


Café Disco

by rivendellrose



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Chaptered, Coffee, F/M, Gen, Star Trek As Sit-Com, Tea
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-04-16 23:39:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14175855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: Michael Burnham has worked for seven years at the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House. The work is hard, but the team gets along well, and she has a particularly close and well-established relationship with the owner, Philippa Georgiou, who hired her while she was still in high school.Then, one day, everything goes terribly wrong, and Michael has to learn how to pick up the pieces and start over in a new life... and a new coffee shop.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly never thought I would write a coffee shop AU. I started describing it as a joke. Then... it worked. And it stopped being a joke. And then it became clear that it could not be properly done as a one-shot, and so here we are.
> 
> I'm hoping to keep a regular posting schedule of posting roughly every 2 weeks, and I've planned for ~~10 chapters~~ 11 chapters - I forgot to account for the fact that Ao3 counts the prologue as a chapter! 
> 
> This was intended as an ensemble piece that includes a bit of everyone, but that varies chapter by chapter, and Michael is definitely both the POV character and the main character, here.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House runs into some very unexpected difficulties, and Michael's life is changed forever.

The new barista, Connor, was not having a good first day at the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House. He'd gotten off to a fine start, arriving on time and taking notes - actual notes in an actual notebook - while the assistant manager Michael Burnham showed him the ins and outs of the till, the espresso machines, the pastry case, and the refrigerator before opening, but to his great misfortune there was some kind of big academic conference -- Michael kept hearing people talking about musicology? -- going on at the convention center a few blocks away, and apparently anesthesiologists or whatever they were approved of patronizing local business. Which was great for the Shenzhou, but not especially great for a newbie like Connor.

"I need a pot of jasmine green, two lattes, one cinnamon and one plain with soy, and three mini-quiches."

Michael suppressed a sigh. "Veg or regular?"

"What?" 

"The quiches; did they want the bacon-and-leek or the vegetarian?" 

Connor's expression turned from confusion to horror. "I... I don't know. I'm sorry, I forgot to ask."

"Well, go ask them! Saru, can you get those lattes started for me while I open the new container of jasmine green?"

Saru straightened himself to his full and very impressive height, his long face pulled into a dubious frown. "Can't you handle both? I have customers waiting for these _palmiers_ and _croissants_." Of course he pronounced it all the French way. ‘Pommy-eh.’ 'Cwah-san.' 

Cursing the day that the owner of the Shenzhou, a woman for whom Michael otherwise felt nothing but respect and affection, had decided to make all their pastries in-house, Michael glared up at the baker. "We don't need croissants and palmiers right now, we still have some in the case. What we need right now are lattes, which customers are waiting for. The drinks orders are going to pile up faster than the pastries."

Saru looked about to open his mouth to argue further (and, inevitably, to point out that as the pastry-chef and baker in the facility he ought to outrank someone who was 'just' another barista, whether or not she was the assistant manager) when the curtain separating the kitchen and the cafe brushed aside to reveal Philippa Georgiou, owner and manager of the Shenzhou. 

She took in the scene with a practiced gaze and raised an eyebrow at her assistant manager. "Busy morning?"

"You have no idea."

"Ah, but I do. Which is why I decided to come down."

"It's your day off," Michael protested as Philippa hung up her coat, pulled on an apron, and tied her long, black hair into a ponytail at the nape of her neck.

"It's my cafe. I don't have days off when we're this busy. What do we need?"

"Two lattes, one cinnamon and one soy. And more by now."

"I can make those--" Saru started, but Philippa waved him off.

"Go back to the pastry, there's no sense letting the case get low now that I'm here. I'm not much for making _palmiers_ anymore, but I think I can rouse my rusty bones to making a few lattes."

Saru followed orders and returned to the pastry station in back, while Philippa and Michael fell into rhythms as familiar as breathing, all but dancing around each other as they made drink orders. Philippa had hired Michael on as a barista while she was still in high school, and she'd worked summers, weekend morning shifts and some afternoons during the school year, and then full-time after Michael's scholarship for university had fallen through. Others had come and gone, but Philippa and Michael stayed, working the counter and cleaning the shop together after closing. And that day, hours later, was no different. At least not until the doors were locked, and Philippa had sent home the other employees. She made one last pot of tea and brought it and a pair of almond cookies to a table, gesturing Michael to sit down.

"I've been thinking about opening another shop," she said. "There's commercial real estate on the south side of town that's cheap enough to rent, and there are a lot of offices and apartment buildings going up around there right now. The big boys are moving in, but nobody's put in a local cafe yet, and it's up-market enough that doing so would be a good bet."

"That's a great idea." Michael took a sip of her tea. 

"I'd like you to run it."

"As full manager?" Michael stared. "I'm not sure--"

"You'll be finished with your night school degree in the spring, and you've already learned more from running this shop than I knew when I started it.” Philippa took a delicate bite of almond cookie and watched Michael closely, her eyes glittering with mischief. “Consider it a selfish move on my part, if it helps. I don't want to hire a manager I don't know, someone who'll push to do things a different way or bite at my back."

"That's... really generous of you, Philippa, but--"

"I've said before I see this as a chain of shops. I meant that. I can't run them all myself... and I'll need a co-owner."

Michael's heart sank. "I don't have the capitol--"

"Don't be ridiculous. I can handle that myself." Philippa poured herself more tea. "I'm not looking for an investor, Michael, I'm looking for a partner. You've got the skills, you've got the drive, and I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this. And someday, when I'm ready to retire, the shops will be yours. The whole network of shops, by then, all across the city. Maybe even down the coast," she added as she pulled her hair out of its ponytail and tossed it with a cheerful smile. "Of course, you'll have to support me in my retirement."

"Of course."

"It won't be easy. I'll be a white-haired old dragon, more than half-blind if my grandmother is any indication, and even more cantankerous than I am now. And you'll have to make my morning tea exactly right."

"I think I can manage," Michael assured her. Learning how the boss took her tea had been one of her first jobs as a newbie barista, and she could now make just about anything to Philippa's exacting standards without so much as thinking about it. 

"Good." Philippa finished her tea and sat back. "You'll come with me next Tuesday to look at the location, then. We'll go out for dinner to celebrate, after, if it meets our approval."

Michael drove back to her tiny apartment with her head afloat. Philippa had always talked about making the shop into a chain, it was true, and this wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned that she wanted Michael to step up into a full manager position if that ever happened. But it had never seemed so real before. And she was nowhere near retirement, but the way she talked about Michael supporting her when that time came... it made Michael feel warm and at home. Appreciated. Even loved.

The next day, the conference was still in town and the cafe was still packed. If possible, it was worse than before. By the time Philippa arrived at seven-thirty, Michael had already talked Connor through a minor breakdown about blended iced drinks and Saru had retreated to the kitchen, ostensibly to make pastry but, Michael was pretty sure, really because the two of them couldn’t stop sniping at each other over the proper way to make a white chocolate mocha. The conference attendees seemed even less happy than they had the previous day, too, and Michael was getting the uncomfortable sense that all was not collegial and friendly in the world of musciologists or whatever they were. 

The lunch rush passed by in a whirl, and by one in the afternoon Michael was beginning to think they might all survive the day, when suddenly a professional disagreement at one of the tables got a lot louder than the chatter at the surrounding tables.

“Fuck you, Lois,” a woman in a gray blazer announced in a voice that carried across the whole cafe. “You _knew_ I was doing my presentation on the potential medical applications of that compound, and you _know_ I need this publication if I’m ever going to get tenure.”

Michael tensed and started toward the table, but Philippa caught her arm. 

“But--”

“Let them fight,” Philippa said in a low, calm tone. “They’ll realize what fools they’re making of themselves soon enough, and leave.”

Michael looked toward the table. “My parents were in academia. When it comes to tenure, I don’t think--”

“Everybody on the west coast knew, Janet -- because you never shut up about your damned samples _or_ your hard-on to be noticed by the tenure committee. We’ve all got that dream. But you collaborated with me on this research, and then you sat on it for _months_ , and every time I emailed you about when we were going to publish, you ignored me. I had to do something! I’m moving to another institution at the end of the year! Three of the other post-docs in my lab moved to corporate biotech, and one of them quit to open a goddamned pizza place. That’s how bad this department is right now. And you--”

Janet stood up and got in Lois’s face. Michael wasn’t hearing words anymore. This was about to get bad, and the two tea sets on the women’s table were right in the middle of the impending disaster. Not to mention the potential lawsuit if one of them spilled tea and then someone slipped and fell. 

“Michael, no.”

Michael looked back at Philippa--her boss, the woman who’d taught her everything she knew, and as patient and intelligent a business owner as any in the world. Her sense of ethics and morality was unquestionable. But this time she was clearly being naive. “You’ll thank me, later,” Michael said, and twisted her arm out of Philippa’s grasp to step fluidly out from behind the counter. 

It was at that exact moment that one of the women’s male colleagues approached and said, “Ladies, as fun as it might be to post on social media, I’m sure we don’t need a catfight in the middle of this nice cafe.”

Janet punched him at roughly the same time Lois slapped her. Michael launched forward to try to grab Janet’s arm, but the male colleague lunged in at the same time and inadvertently punched her, instead, then lost his balance and knocked over the table. Plates, tea cups, teapots, and cutlery crashed to the floor, and at least two people screamed. A fourth unknown person entered the fray, possibly on behalf of the two women, and shouting, slaps, and punches took over Michael’s senses. She had a vague impression of Philippa wading into the battle, surprisingly upright and impressive despite not being any taller than Michael herself, and attempting to haul the combatants apart before she took an elbow to the face. The blood pouring down her face didn’t stop her from grabbing at Michael and trying to haul her back, but it did look rather bad when the police arrived a moment later to find the battle still raging. Apparently one of the patrons had called. So did the black eye Michael had somehow acquired. 

As the officers separated the combatants, Michael got her first clear look at the damage to the Shenzhou’s dining room. Shards of broken glass and pottery littered the floor, along with the splintered remains of a table and three chairs. Tea, coffee, and sodden bits of pastry squelched underfoot. A window had been broken. And at least six patrons had been injured. The shop was a mess. It was going to take days, not to mention a lot of money, to get it back on its feet.

“Hands behind you, miss.” One of the officers held her shoulder firmly.

“No, she’s my employee--oh, thank you.” Philippa raised something wrapped in a tea towel and handed to her by Saru up to her swollen eye. “She was trying to break up the fight.”

“That’s not what several witnesses are saying, ma’am.” 

Philippa looked like she was going to say something else, but Saru bent solicitously over her with a first aid kit, and she closed her mouth and looked away.

And that was it. Michael allowed herself to be handcuffed, then slumped into the back of one of the squad cars with Janet—or maybe it was Lois, she honestly wasn’t sure anymore—and turned off inside. Her life as she had known it was over. The police offered her a phone call, but the idea of calling up her foster parents, who’d raised her after her own died in a tragic car accident when she was five, and telling them what had happened—telling them she was in lock-up and had been arrested for assault—was simply too horrific to consider. She sat in silence in lockup. 

The next morning, Philippa arrived. She stood by, her face impassive and her eyes shielded by sunglasses even inside the precinct office as she waited for Michael to collect her few effects, and then turned without a word and walked to her car. Michael followed.

“You should have left me in there,” she muttered once the car door was shut. 

“Maybe.” Philippa buckled her seatbelt and set her hands—very deliberately not clenched—on the steering wheel. 

When it became clear she wasn’t planning to say anything more, Michael said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No. You shouldn’t. You should have listened to me. You should have _trusted_ me.”

“I do—”

“You didn’t. You thought you knew better. And now you’ve put twenty people out of work for the next month at least. Not to mention cost me more than I can afford to spend right now.”

“I’ll pay you back for the bail—”

“I’m not talking about the bail, Michael. I’m talking about the shop.”

“But we have insurance,” Michael protested. “The insurance will cover—”

“It’s lapsed.”

Horrified, Michael stared at her. “What? Since when?”

“I should have renewed it the first of this month. But I thought I was being clever—I thought we would wait to renew until we’d signed the lease on the new location, and got a business loan to start it up. I didn’t have the cash on hand to do both, but I was sure we’d get a good loan for the new space, and that having two shops up and running would let me pay off the loan without any trouble. And that since we were renewing at twice the capacity as before, the insurance company wouldn’t blink at a little delay.”

“So…”

“The shop was uninsured for our little disaster yesterday.” She offered a tight, joyless little smile. “I’ll be covering all the damages out of pocket, it seems.”

“Oh, God… Philippa, I’m so sorry—” 

“Sorry doesn’t get us out of this mess. Not from either of us.” Philippa turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the parking space. “And sorry doesn’t pay our employees.”

“I’ll... I’ll quit if you want me to.”

“How would that help.” She turned left at the light and began driving Michael back to her apartment. A few more intersections passed in silence. “I’m working on it. Maybe I can still take out a loan, this time to get the Shenzhou fixed up and open again. I have some savings, too. Just… we’ll see what happens.”

The next day the shop was closed. And the day after that. 

Monday morning Michael's phone rang at 9am, and she answered without looking at the number, assuming it'd be Philippa telling her to go down and reopen. 

"Michael Burnham?" a stranger's voice asked. 

Michael shifted her phone between her cheek and shoulder. "This is she."

"I’m calling from Valley General Hospital. You're listed as the emergency contact in Philippa Georgiou's phone."

Michael’s hand tightened around her keys. "What happened."

*** 

“It was just a little fender-bender,” Philippa protested when she got out of surgery. “I told them not to call you, that I’d take an Uber home, but they said they’d already made the call.”

“You have two broken ribs, a leg that’s broken in three places, and a concussion, Philippa! That’s more than a ‘little fender-bender!’”

Philippa waved her hand the same way she did when Saru and Michael got into another argument about vegan pastry, and Michael began to wonder if she was losing her mind, feeling nostalgic about those fights. But times had been so easy then. 

“I’ll be fine,” Philippa said. Then her face deflated, and Michael’s heart sank as she realized she’d never seen Philippa look so old. “Eventually. But I can’t stay here. I’m going to California to stay with my sister for a while. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

A chill settled in Michael’s heart. “And… the shop?”

“The Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House is closed. Permanently.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael meets some interesting people, encounters an old co-worker, and gets a new job.

“Venti iced mocha cappuccino for Sam, and… two quads with coconut milk and a bacon breakfast croissant sandwich for Meredith?”

A slender, older woman with stick-straight brown hair looked up briefly from her phone, then back down again, her lips pressed tight together. ‘Meredith’ and ‘Sam’ both retrieved their orders. Michael looked over what was coming up in the orders. That woman had been waiting a long time. “Excuse me? What did you order?” 

“Iced americano, no room, and a slice of banana bread.” The woman lifted her paper bag. “I got the banana bread, but I’m still waiting on the americano.”

“I’m so sorry,” Michael told her automatically. “What was the name on the order?”

“Katrina.”

Michael dug through the order receipts. There it was—timestamped ten minutes ago. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “I’ll get that right away. Would you like something else while you wait? A slice of coffee cake, maybe? Or—”

“I’m fine.” The customer—Katrina, apparently, although Michael had worked as a barista long enough to know better than to assume that everyone gave their real name at the order counter, or there were a lot more people named ‘Lord Voldemort’ or ‘James Bond,’ or ‘None of Your Business’ than she would have guessed in the world—offered a faint, long-suffering smile. “The last thing I need right now is more sugar. I just need the caffeine.”

“I’ll make it personally,” Michael assured her. It would mean backing up the _other_ orders that were waiting, but better they should be delayed by a few minutes than this well-dressed and understandably irritable business woman should wait another ten in case one of her temporary coworkers accidentally skipped by her again. And so it went, all day. Someone got mad because they ordered a tall, then received what they deemed a “small.” Someone else wanted to pick up all the salads before selecting one. And an hour before Michael’s shift ended a group of students rearranged two tables and six chairs, then declined to move them back when their study group ended.

It was hell. But it was the kind of hell that Michael had grown resigned to over the last several months. With Philippa gone and the Shenzhou closed, she’d been taking temporary shifts at every coffee shop in town to try to make ends meet, not to mention doing occasional retail cashier work when the temp agency she’d signed up with could find it for her. 

No one talked to her. No one asked if she’d be back the next day. They all knew it was unlikely she would, or that, if she was, it would only be for that day. And she’d had so many job interviews in the last six months that she was losing hope. The interview that afternoon wasn’t likely to be any different, but she had to try. The minimal work she’d been able to get since the Shenzhou’s closing hadn’t been enough to pay rent, and she’d been slowly but surely eating down her savings. If she didn’t find something permanent in the next month she was going to have to fall back on the mercy of her foster family or get evicted, and an eviction would look terrible on her record.

The café was in a nice enough area, though a bit further from the tourist centers than the Shenzhou had been, and almost brand new. Michael parked, straightened her clothes and reapplied her makeup in her rearview mirror, and drew a deep breath, then grabbed a notebook and copy of her resumé and headed in. 

Her first impression of Café Disco was that it was going for a much more modernist aesthetic than she would have expected. The name implied something funky and quirky, but the look of the place was all chrome and shine. Those counters had to be hell to keep polished, and the floors looked like they had been waxed just that morning. The whole effect couldn’t have been further from the cozy, low-key charm of the Shenzhou. But the Shenzhou was gone, and the likelihood was, after six months, that it wasn’t coming back. And neither was Philippa. 

She was just getting used to the idea of the place when a familiar figure stepped out from the back and looked her up and down. 

"Saru." Michael's heart sank. They had never gotten along at the best of times, but now--

"Michael." The two clipped syllables of her name, paired with the tightness in the tall pastry chef's voice and the way his whole face seemed to pinch around the word told her everything she needed to know about her welcome here. "I would not have thought you would have the nerve to continue working in the service industry, after what happened."

“Believe it or not, Saru, I didn’t mean to cause any of that.”

“Intention hardly matters in these circumstances. If you hadn’t jumped into the fray—”

A tall man with very short dark hair, a worn face and a charming smile stepped out from the back, wiping off his hands with a tea towel. “Ah, Mr. Saru, you should have told me our next interview was here. I take it you know her?”

That’s it, Michael thought. I’m screwed.

“We worked together in the past.” Saru straightened himself up to his full height.

“Well, I’m glad to bring about a little reunion. I’m Gabriel Lorca, I own this place. Let’s go have a seat at what I laughingly call my office, Ms. Burnham.” He gestured her into the back, through the kitchen and to a small room crammed with a computer and file cabinets. A bowl of fortune cookies sat on the desk.

“You should know, sir, that there was an incident at my previous place of employment.” Michael sat down stiffly. 

“Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House. I know.”

“You looked at my résumé? Before I got here?” That hardly ever happened at these interviews. Even when it was submitted well in advance, the supervisor interviewing her had rarely taken so much as a cursory glance. Most didn’t even know her name before she told them. 

“Well, yeah, but that was mostly to see what else you’ve done. I was a bit of a fan of the Shenzhou’s style. Sorry to see them close, though I can’t say I’m sorry to have lost the competition. A place like that going down opens up a big gap in the market, and I was lucky enough to start Café Disco at exactly the right time.”

Michael braced herself. “Saru will tell you I’m the reason the Shenzhou closed.”

“Then I guess you could say I’ve got you to thank for how well we’ve been doing here.” Lorca cast a glance over the résumé she handed him, then set it aside.

That wasn’t what Michael had expected. She pressed on, in case he hadn’t quite gotten the picture. “He’ll also say that hiring me is a terrible choice. That I’ll screw up and ruin this café, too.”

“Seems like you might have the purpose of this conversation a little mixed up, here, Ms. Burnham.”

“Michael, please. And… no. I just want you to know. And to know that I know.”

“Do you not want this job?”

“No, sir.” She watched his eyebrows climb. “I _need_ this job.”

“That’s more like it.” He smirked. “So tell me your side, then.”

Michael opened her mouth… and then closed it again. “I really don’t have any explanation, sir. I thought stepping in was the best move. I was sure the customers would escalate, and that Philippa’s strategy of standing back would just cause more trouble in the long run. But then I got pulled in, and I wound up getting arrested for assault along with the customers in question. Philippa bailed me out, and…” 

“The shop was pretty beat up, from what I heard.” 

Michael nodded.

“That happens sometimes. I figure, if a person can’t take a little bit of havoc and destruction from time to time, they shouldn’t be in the customer service industry. We’re not here to play tea party, if you’ll forgive the metaphor—we’re here to make money. Sometimes that’s got more in common with war than it does with something nice and quiet and polite, and that’s just a fact of life.”

That wasn’t at all the way Philippa had thought of her shop. Of course she’d wanted to make money, but she’d opened the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House because she wanted to make it a community space, somewhere that people could meet friends and clients that wasn’t so corporate and sanitized, and she’d wanted to expose people to real tea and to coffee that hadn’t either spent hours sitting in a pot or been chosen specifically for its high caffeine content. Saying so – or defending her – wasn’t going to get Michael a new job, though. And she desperately needed a new job, so Michael kept her mouth shut. 

“If you’re the kind of person who sees a fight and wades in to try to stop it yourself rather than standing by,” Lorca continued, “then it sounds like you might be the kind of person I want on my team.” 

Michael stared. This conversation was not going at all how she had expected, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. 

“If you still want the job. Excuse me— _need_ the job. 

Something about Lorca bothered her, but… “Yes. I do.”

“Good. Can you start tomorrow?”

***

The next morning found Michael back at Café Disco wearing her best pair of black jeans (required dress code, Lorca had informed her) and a nice t-shirt (graphic acceptable, but no curse words or corporate logos), wearing long earrings and more makeup than she’d worn in weeks. She wanted to make a good impression, and dressing up felt a bit like armor – and a bit like reminding herself that this job mattered. Even if it wasn’t where she wanted to be, even if it wasn’t at all who she wanted to be working for, she needed the paycheck. It was that or go back to live at home again, and that was something Michael had sworn she wouldn’t do. 

When she walked in the back entrance Saru was working at a pastry station. He gave her a sour look, but continued cutting butter into his flour. The other two employees present were women – one tall and dark haired with a serious expression and an East Indian cast to her features, and the other a short redhead whose curls were nearly as exuberant as her face when she spotted Michael. 

“You must be the new employee! I’m Sylvia, but everybody calls me Tilly. Because it’s my last name, but also because Sylvia sounds kind of old, don’t you think? Or maybe that’s just me – it’s my grandma’s name, too. What’s your name?”

“Michael.”

Tilly frowned. “Not Michaela?”

“No, Michael.”

“Was there… some kind of mix-up, or—I mean, not that there would have to be, it’s just kind of unusual. Oh, unless you go by male pronouns? Have I screwed that up already?” Her face fell, and Michael almost expected her nose to quiver, bunny-like, in terror.

“I go by female pronouns,” Michael assured her. “It’s just a name.”

“Well, if you want to go by something else—maybe Micky? Or—”

“It’s my name. And I like it the way it is.”

“Oh. Sorry. I, um… I’m new, too, is all. This is my first real job, actually. I’m still in college.”

Michael forced herself to remember that not everyone who didn’t take at least a part-time job straight out of high school was inherently spoiled. “What are you studying?”

“Biology? But I’m kind of nervous because I heard they make a lot of the early bio classes really hard, so that they can cut out the people who can’t handle pre-med, and—”

“Have you set up the pastry case yet, Tilly?” the other woman broke in.

Tilly’s face fell. “Um, no ma’am.”

“Then get in there, we open in five. Burnham, prep the espresso machine. I assume you know how to do that? Since you’ve worked in at least one functioning shop before.”

Michael gritted her teeth. “I do, yes.”

“Good. Get to it. And I don’t want any more chatter once the doors open, okay?”

“That’s fine,” Burnham replied, turning toward the unfamiliar machine. They were all more or less the same once you learned them, but each brand and model had its own quirks and preferences. She felt a strange, momentary ache for the well-known angles of the old espresso machine at the Shenzhou. “Do you mind my asking if we’re it today?”

“For now. Paul won’t be here for another ten minutes, he ran into bad traffic on the freeway. Or at least that’s today’s excuse. Don’t think you can get away with that, by the way – if we weren’t so short-handed I’d have fired him the last time he was late.”

“Noted.” Michael checked the location of the milk. “So you must be—”

“Landry. Whenever Lorca and Saru aren’t here, I’m in charge. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Landry cast a critical eye over her work and gave a small nod. “When you’re done with that you can make sure the mini-fridge under the counter has enough supplies for today. You’ll be on drinks to start – Tilly isn’t ready for anything but the register yet. If you get a lull in the customers, train her, but keep an eye on the door while you do it.”

“Of course.”

“And hey, Burnham.” Landry smiled like a shark. “Don’t start any fights with the customers. We can’t afford to close up for a day while we rebuild the place.”

“What did she mean by that?” Tilly asked, getting up from the pastry case once Landry had gone into the back. 

“Have you heard of the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House?”

“Oh, yeah! That’s that cute little place on Third that got closed down a while ago. I heard it was because — oh. You mean, um—”

“I used to work there.” Michael wiped down the counter, more for something to do than because the shiny metal actually needed it. “I was the assistant manager.”

“Oh. Wait.” Tilly bent over the box of pastries. “So the person who got in a fight with some customers and… that was you.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. But—” 

Michael looked at the clock. “It’s seven. I’m going to go open up.”

When she got back, Tilly was quiet. She opened the register, and they dealt with the first four or five customers in silence. Saru came out, the pastries in the oven, and took the other register. Between customers, both of them avoided her gaze. 

Paul showed up, a disheveled, white-blond man who could have been anywhere between his late twenties and late forties. He ignored Michael completely, snapped at Tilly, then disappeared into the back. Saru followed. She could hear their voices, but couldn’t hear what they said.

A little while later he started refilling the syrups. When Michael went to help, he shifted to block her. “I’ve got this.”

“I just thought—”

“Help the newbie if you want to win points somewhere. I can handle this.”

“Okay, fine.” It seemed remotely possible that he was just self-conscious after arriving late, but it seemed more likely that Saru had shared her history. Again. 

She took a walk for her first break, but there wasn’t much to see. After the lunch crowd had left, Saru put Paul on the register and told Landry, Tilly, and Michael to take their lunch breaks. Landry and Tilly pointedly took a two-seat table at the back. Michael ate alone.

On her last break, Michael went out into the back alley. She’d quit smoking years before, at Philippa’s urging, but she would have killed for a cigarette just then. 

Off to the side of the dumpster there was a rustling. She stood back, ready to kick if it was a rat, but what emerged was a dirty, notch-eared gray cat, who regarded her with a dubious expression in his green eyes. Michael relaxed.

“Hey, buddy.” She bent down. “You lost? You don’t have a collar, do you?”

The backdoor opened behind her, and she nearly jumped to her feet. 

“Is that damned thing back? Scat! Get out of here!” Lorca banged on the door, and the cat took off running. “I knew I should’ve called animal control the last time it showed up.”

“It’s just hungry.” Michael frowned. “It probably keeps the mice and rats away.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Lorca snorted. “By pissing and crapping all over the back alley. If it finds its way in and we get inspected, we’re up shit creek for sure. Not to mention it’s probably got rabies.”

Michael remembered asking her parents for a pet, when she was little. She’d never tried later, with her foster parents. She’d felt sure they would say no. “Did you need something?”

“Yeah. I know it’s your break but I wanted to get your paperwork set up while I’m here. Assuming you’d like to get paid on time,” he added with a half-smile. 

“Sure. I wasn’t doing anything.” 

“Great. Come on, and we can get it done before folks start trickling in for their afternoon caffeine fix.”

He turned back inside, and Michael glanced back to where the cat had gone. She hoped it had gone off to find a better, safer place to hunt.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael and the rest of the Café Disco have trouble with a cat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wherever a character's name seems reasonable for a 21st century Earth setting, even by a stretch, I've retained it - for instance, as was seen in previous chapters, I've kept Saru's name unchanged. This chapter contains mentions of Michael's foster family, however, and their Vulcan names felt really jarring in the AU setting. My beta reader agreed, so I changed them in ways that I thought would be least intrusive and, perhaps, slightly amusing to readers. I apologize if this is confusing or annoying!

“Can we do ‘bone dry’ capuccinos?”

In her head, Michael groaned. “Yes, we can.”

“Oh good.” Tilly turned back to the customer, who had one earbud in his ear, with a smile. “Did you want anything else with that?”

“A scone.”

“Sure!” Tilly bent down to the case. “Which kind did you want?”

“What have you got?”

“Um, we’ve got cranberry orange, raspberry, cinnamon, and cheddar and chives.”

“Ham and cheddar.”

“Oh. No, I mean – I’m sorry, we don’t have that. We have—”

“Then why did you say it?”

“No, I—”

The customer gave an exaggerated sigh. “Whatever. Raspberry is fine.”

“Um. Okay.” Tilly retrieved the scone, took his name, and wrote the coffee order on the cup and rang up his total. The customer put in his other earbud and went to stand by the newspaper rack waiting for his order. Then, since there weren’t any other customers in line, she turned to Michael. “What does that mean, anyway? ‘Bone dry?’ It’s a capuccino, it kind of has to be wet, right? It’s a liquid?”

“It’s a capuccino with just espresso and foam,” Michael said. “No milk.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” Tilly stared as Michael started the espresso. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Can I watch?”

Michael glanced out across the counter. The door was still, and the customers were all absorbed in their phones or conversations or laptops or whatever. “Okay. But pay attention to the door so you won’t ignore anyone who comes in. If someone shows up in the middle I can always show you the rest later.”

Luck was with them, though, and she made it through the whole process – with every bit of precision that Philippa had trained into her – without interruption or error. She had to wave at the customer to get his attention to pick up his drink, but when he sipped it he seemed happy, and raised his cup to her as he slouched toward the door.

“Wow. Okay, that was amazing,” Tilly gushed.

Michael couldn’t help a little smile at that. “It was a capuccino. Your standards for ‘amazing’ might be a little low.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t even know what it was, and you just — I mean, wow! And that guy was ready to be annoyed, too. I could tell. But he liked it! You have to teach me.”

“To make a bone dry capuccino? I just did.”

“No, you have to _mentor_ me!” Tilly glanced back toward the kitchen, where Landry was talking with Saru about the pastries they needed for later in the day. “You’re really good at this. I remember hearing about the Shenzhou, it was a great café. And you were the assistant manager! You know everything!”

“You’re in college, Tilly. You’re a biology major. You don’t need to know everything about coffee shops.”

“No, but I do!” Tilly grabbed her arm, and Michael struggled not to pull it away. “My parents are paying as much as they can for school, but it’s expensive and they make too much money for me to get scholarships, so I took out a bunch of loans, and I have to work. If I can be a good barista, I can get a job anywhere, even if I get fired from here or whatever. I want to be good. Please?”

Back at the Shenzhou, Michael had trained dozens of new baristas. It had been one of her favorite parts of the job, passing on everything Philippa had taught her – making sure they did everything exactly the way Philippa wanted it, and quizzing them until they weren’t fazed by any bizarre request a customer could make. That was part of why Philippa had made her assistant manager. Part of why she’d wanted her to be her business partner and run the new shop.

The image of Philippa, drained and defeated and bruised in a hospital bed, filled Michael’s mind. Of the Shenzhou, broken furniture scattered and the door closed for good, and the employees scrambling to find other jobs. “It’s not a good idea. Ask Landry.”

“But—”

The bell over the door jingled. “Customers.” Michael jerked her chin toward the door. “You’ll learn on your own. Don’t worry about it.”

***

Later that morning, Michael went back into the kitchen to get more milk out of the big fridge, and just as she lugged the vat out of the fridge to refill the smaller container, a piercing shriek rang out from the back alley.

She shoved the milk back in the fridge and pushed it closed, then ran out the back door, more than half expecting a mugging in progress. What she found was Landry, two full garbage bags on the ground in front of her, gripping her arm. Blood trickled between her fingers.

“That fucking cat scratched me!”

“Oh my goodness.” Saru, who had appeared behind Michael, pulled back into the kitchen and closed the door as if the cat might launch itself at him next.

“Get her a towel,” Michael told him.

“I don’t think we should use—”

“I’ll pay for it, just get the damned towel!”

Paul ducked under Saru’s arm and handed Michael one of the ratty old towels they used in the back. He’d wet half of it in cold water.

“I’ll kill that damned flea bus if I see it again,” Landry gritted out as she pulled her hand away from the wound. Five distinct red lines starting with deep punctures cut through her skin, bleeding and already swollen around the edges. She hissed as she pressed the wet part of the towel down on the cuts, then folded the dry part over it as pink started to show through the white cotton. “God damn it. I’m allergic to cats, and that thing lives in dumpsters and god knows what else. I’m gonna get septicemia on top of an allergic reaction.”

“There’s an urgent care clinic two doors down,” Paul said. “We’ll take you there, they can get you cleaned up and give you antihistimines. And whatever else they think you need.”

“Stitches, probably,” she muttered. Then she looked up. Michael followed her gaze to see Lorca standing in the doorway. “I’m quitting if you don’t get rid of that thing for real this time, Gabriel. If I see it again, I’m fucking out.”

“Understood. I’ll deal with it.”

“Good.” Landry flexed her hand, then winced. “Where’s the clinic?”

“Two doors down, next to the Crossfit place.” Paul leaned inside and grabbed his jacket off the coat-rack. “I’ll walk you.”

Landry rolled her eyes. “I’m not so bad off I’m going to pass out in the alley.”

“No, but my boyfriend works there. The receptionists all know me, I can probably get them to push you up the list to be seen sooner.”

“Fine. Thanks.” They walked off down the alley.

“Okay, show’s over, everybody get back in there and back to work,” Lorca snapped. “Come on, move. Not you, Michael,” he added. “Did you see where the cat went?”

The seconds between hearing Landry’s scream and getting out into the alley were suddenly something that Michael was glad for. “No, sorry. It probably ran away when she yelled.”

“Mm. Maybe. But it didn’t go far.” Lorca frowned into the alley. “The damned thing eats the garbage out of our dumpster. None of the other shops on this block have food, but we’ve got chicken salad and bits of breakfast sandwich getting thrown out every day. It’ll come back, and animal control can deal with it. I gotta find their number.”

He turned away toward the cramped little office in the back where he kept his computer and paperwork.

Michael pressed her lips tightly together. He wasn’t wrong. The cat was clearly eating their garbage, and whatever rodents also came for the trash, and with the oven and espresso machine running all day their part of the alley was probably warmer than any other. There was an overhang in the back, too, that kept the rain off a little gap between the dumpster and the stairway down into the alley. She could picture the cat huddled up there to keep dry. She sighed and went back inside, washed her hands, and went back up to the front.

“They’ll just trap it, though, right?” Tilly said softly. She’d clearly been listening before she scooted back to the counter. “Then they’ll take it to the shelter and find it a new home?”

“I don’t know.”

Her pink face went pale, and scrunched up with emotion. “But… they will, right? Nobody would put it to sleep just because it was hungry and someone scared it.”

“I _don’t know_ ,” Michael repeated. She remembered vague stories she’d heard about the city’s animal shelter being crowded, about the difficulty of getting older cats adopted. About animals who had proved aggressive and attacked someone being flagged as unadoptable and euthanized.

Out of the back, she faintly heard Lorca telling the story to the animal control office. The cat was a nuisance. It had attacked one of his employees. No, he wasn’t sure if she had her rabies shots, but she was at a clinic right now getting medical attention…

Tears welled in Tilly’s eyes. “It’s not the cat’s fault,” she whispered, glancing nervously toward the door. Outside, a trio of teenagers hovered near the door, though it was hard to tell whether they were thinking of coming in or just horsing around. “He shouln’t die just because he got scared. Landry scares me all the time,” she added with a faint burble of desperate laughter. “Please, Michael…”

Michael had no idea how this had become her responsibility – probably just because Tilly knew that Saru wouldn’t lift a finger, and she was the only other person in the café who might have some sympathy for the cat’s plight or Tilly’s emotional attachment to it. But it had happened, and she couldn’t do anything about that, now.

 _This could get me fired_ , she thought as she crossed the short space back to Lorca’s office. But she knew what Philippa would have done. Besides, she knew a few things about being alone and desperate.

“Sir?” She knocked on the door, relieved to see he was still on the phone.

“I’m a little busy, here, Burnham.”

“I can catch the cat, sir. If they’ll just bring a humane trap, I’ll catch the cat this evening, after we close, and I’ll find somewhere to take it.”

Lorca looked at her as if she’d suggested that they might bathe in espresso straight from the machine. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’d like to do it, sir. And Tilly’s said that she’ll help me. If you’ll just tell them to bring a humane trap—”

“All right, Burnham. On your own head be it if the damned thing attacks you, too, though. And you make sure you’re off the clock before you do this. I don’t need _another_ workman’s comp claim out of this situation.”

He relayed the message to the animal control people and shooed her back to the front, where she made espressos in silence for the rest of the afternoon. Landry came back, after a while, with a huge sanitary wrapping on her arm, and towing a rather smug-looking Paul in her wake. She shook her head and rolled her eyes when Lorca told her about Michael and Tilly’s plan, but she let it go when Lorca told her to take the last two hours of her shift off, paid, and go home.

Someone dropped off a humane trap for the cat, and Michael and Tilly finished out their shifts up to closing. They cleaned up and swept, then clocked out and waited while everyone else left, and Michael took a bacon-and-egg biscuit out of the fridge, broke it up into bits, heated in the shop’s microwave, and baited the trap with it.

Then they set up the trap in the alley, right by the dumpster where Michael had seen the cat earlier. All the rest of the trash from the afternoon they’d kept bagged up in the kitchen, not to be taken out until after the cat was caught, so that the trap was the only food smell to attract it.

“There’s no saying how long it’ll take,” Michael said as she came back inside, shutting off the lights in the kitchen as she went. “You could go. You probably have homework to do.”

“I’ll be okay. I always have my class stuff in my bag when I get here, since I come straight from school.” She hefted a backpack up onto the table, then pulled out a tablet computer, a notebook, a biology textbook, and a pack of index cards. “Do you have anything?”

“I’ve got my Kindle.” Michael pulled it out of her purse.

“We could just talk if you want—”

“It’s okay. You need to get work done.”

“Right.” Tilly looked a little disappointed, then opened the textbook. A few minutes later she took a highlighter out of her bag, went to mark a passage, and then stopped. “Did you have pets growing up?”

“No.” Michael set the Kindle down on the table. “My foster brother had a cat, but it really was just his, not everybody’s. It didn’t like anybody else.”

“Foster brother?”

“My parents died when I was little.”

Tilly’s blue eyes went wide, and she covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I thought you meant your parents adopted another kid or something…”

“It was a car accident.” Michael forced herself to shrug. It wasn’t like Tilly could help not having known, and she’d brought it up herself by her constant unwillingness to refer to her foster family as if they were biological. “I wound up with a family who’d known my parents. They’d been colleagues, they worked at the same university. And they had a son a few years younger than me.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine, really. You didn’t know. And now you do.” Michael frowned. She hadn’t told Erik and Amanda about the closure of the Shenzhou, but she assumed they’d heard. She was relieved they hadn’t called to ask about it. Amanda would have gotten the story of the incident and her subsequent arrest out of her one way or another, and the last thing she needed was another way to disappoint both of them. “It looks like you have a lot of homework to do. I’m going to go back to my reading.”

Later, when Tilly had finished her chapter of reading and written out a page of diagramming and answers to questions on what looked like the Krebs cycle, Michael got up and looked out the small window next to the back door. Nothing yet.

Tilly finished her homework. Michael finished her book. Tilly played a game on her phone, while Michael flipped through her textbook, then pushed it aside and started writing out an email to Philippa on her phone… then deleted it and pulled up another book—one she’d already read, but at least not recently—on her Kindle.

“We should do something. Play charades—oh, or twenty questions!”

“No.”

“What about Never Have I Ever?”

Michael paused, trying to think how best to express to Tilly her total uninterest in party games, especially of the kind that would unearth more personal details about her life. Blessedly, a soft clatter sounded in the alley before she was forced to make her response.

“Was that—”

“The trap.” Michael got up and stretched. “Let’s go make sure we didn’t catch ourselves a raccoon or something.”

“Oh, gosh. You don’t think that could happen, do you?”

Michael shrugged. “There are raccoons in the city.” But Tilly looked so concerned, then, that she softened and added, “But it seems more likely the cat gave in and went for the sandwich.”

They went back through the dark, quiet kitchen and peered back out into the alley. Sure enough, there was a gray shape hunkered down in the wire cage. It was nearly midnight, but hunger had finally worn out the cat’s aversion to the new and suspicious object in his territory.

The cat was not happy. He growled as they approached the cage, and hissed when they picked it up. The walk around the back to Michael’s car wasn’t a long one, but he made his displeasure known the whole time, alternating mournful yowls with more hisses and growls.

“We’ll just put him in the back seat,” Michael said. “I can take him from there.”

“But he’ll scoot around when you take turns, won’t he? I can come with you. I’ll hold the cage steady.”

“Then how are you going to get home? Isn’t your car here?”

“I take the bus.”

“The buses aren’t running at midnight.”

Tilly shrugged. “I’ll call an Uber. I do that a lot if I stay out late.”

Michael took in a long breath through her nose, held it, then let it out. _I don’t need a new friend. Especially not a wide-eyed college student who can’t even try to keep her feelings contained._ But Tilly wasn’t entirely wrong, and she clearly wasn’t going to give up until Michael agreed to let her help. “Okay, fine. Come on. You’ll have to go in the back seat with the cat, though. I don’t think he’s safe to keep on your lap in the front.”

Tilly agreed. They stopped off at a 24-hour drugstore on the way to Michael’s apartment, where she picked up a can of cheap cat food and the previous Sunday’s newspaper, and very firmly ignored the cat toys, pet-food bowls, and litterboxes. Tilly, of course, picked up a little plastic ball with a bell in it, and jingled it.

“I’m only getting the things he needs for one night,” Michael informed her, taking the ball out of her hand and putting it back on the shelf.

“I know,” Tilly told her defensively as they walked up to the single open cash register. “I was just wondering whether he used to be someone’s pet, you know? Whether he ever had toys like that. Maybe somebody’s looking for him.”

“From what Lorca and Landry said, he’s been living in that alley for months at least.” Michael dug for cash in her wallet, then counted out coins for exact change. “If anybody was looking for him, they’re not doing a very good job. And with that torn ear, it doesn’t seem very likely, anyway.”

“I know. I do,” Tilly insisted, hunching up against the drizzle that had started while they were in the store. “It’s just sad, that’s all.”

The cat had curled himself into a tiny ball while they were gone, like he’d resigned himself to whatever fate they intended for him.

“Hi, Kitty,” Tilly said, tapping her fingers lightly against the wire of the cage. “Are you feeling better?”

The cat hissed at her. Michael tried not to be grimly amused at either of their expenses.

She had to admit that she was grateful for Tilly’s help carrying the unwieldy cage up the back stairs to her apartment, though, and getting the cereal bowls of food and water and the newspaper into the cage without letting the cat out into the rest of the apartment. Failing any better ideas, she put the cage in her tub – at least there if the newspapers failed in their purpose she could clean up relatively easily.

Which was a good thing, because after he finished the half-can of food that Michael gave him and drank some of the water, the cat immediately folded himself up like a loaf of furry gray brioche on the newspapers.

“No, that’s for—oh, whatever.” Michael sighed. “You’ll do what you’ll do, won’t you? And it has to be more comfortable than just the bottom of the cage, so I guess I can’t blame you.”

“Can we give him a towel or something?” Tilly leaned into the bathroom, watching.

“It’s only for tonight, he’ll be fine. I don’t want to open the cage and disturb him again.”

“Okay. I guess that makes sense.” Tilly yawned and looked at her phone. “Oh, jeez. It’s past one. I’m sorry, I should let you get to sleep.”

Guilt tugged at Michael. She remembered a similar night a year or two before, when she’d been over at Philippa’s place late at night, planning a party of some kind—an engagement party, or maybe it was a bridal shower?—for one of the Shenzhou baristas, and after hours of working and drinking wine after dinner, Philippa had made up the couch with spare sheets and pillows, and insisted on her staying the night.

“You should stay,” she said. “I don’t have extra sheets, but the loveseat is clean, and you’re not so tall that you won’t fit on it. I’ve got some extra blankets around. I’ll drop you off at home tomorrow morning before I go in.”

So she set Tilly up on the loveseat, and pulled out the futon for herself. After the rhythm of Tilly’s breath slowed and soothed into the faint snoring of full-on sleep, Michael was still wide awake. And then the cat started meowing piteously in the bathroom. His cries echoed against the tile. Michael sighed and got up.

The cat fell silent as soon as she came into the room, and looked at her with an inscrutable but somehow expectant expression.

“I can’t stay in here all night. And you can’t go out in the rest of the apartment, because I don’t know if you’re house-trained. And you’re not staying here.”

The cat folded his paws under himself and looked up at her. He was nothing at all like her foster brother’s cat, who had been tiger-striped and sleek, with a wedge-shaped head and large, perfect ears. And yet there was something of the same calm confidence in his golden eyes, now that he’d settled down… though it was a friendlier sort of calm than that Chai had ever regarded the child Michael Burnham with, long ago. She held out her hand, fingers cupped but not closed, and the cat sniffed at it through the bars of the cage, then blinked slowly.

Chai had never let her touch him, and had always stalked away, unconcerned and uninterested, whenever she approached him. He’d been as loyal to his young master as a proverbial dog.

Which must have been why he’d followed Leonard out when he went to school one day when he was eight and Michael was ten. Chai had been an indoor-only cat, but he’d slipped out the door somehow in the rush of the morning routine, and, having no sense for the danger of even quiet suburban streets, was hit by a car. The injuries were extensive, veterinary surgery expensive and, in Erik’s eyes, unreasonable for an animal with only a short lifespan remaining to it.

Michael pressed her lips together. Somehow, in the intervening years, she had convinced herself she’d forgotten how broken Leonard had been by his beloved pet’s death, and how dismissive his father had been of that pain. When Erik pointed out to his son that Michael was handling the death of the family pet better than him, she’d known that was the last chance of her foster brother and her ever being anything like friends, or even allies. Leonard had glared at her as if she’d been the one to say as much, and betrayed him.

“I can’t get attached to you,” she told the cat. “You’re going to go to a nice shelter, where some family will pick you.”

Because of course a family would pick a skinny, ragged, notch-eared adult cat who hissed and scratched, and had spent probably half his life living in a dumpster. Instead of a new, fluffy, wide-eyed kitten who would roll around and play. Of course that made sense.

Amanda had brought Chai home to her son as a kitten. That was, she’d explained to a heart-broken five-year-old who missed her parents and couldn’t understand why the kitty wouldn’t let her pet him, why the cat was so devoted to Leonard. “He’ll get used to you,” she’d said. And he had, eventually. As had her son, who was not overly impressed by having an unexpected older sister. But neither of them had ever really warmed to her, and in her heart Michael had always feared that Amanda’s well-intentioned explanation amounted to tacit acknowledgement that a family of birth would always be more important than family added later.

That hadn’t been true of Philippa, though. They hadn’t been family of any kind, really, but Philippa had always treated her as more than an employee, more even than a friend. Why else would she have bailed Michael out, even when she was angry?

Michael looked at her phone—almost two in the morning. The no-kill shelter she’d found online earlier didn’t open until ten, a forty-five-minute drive away, and her shift at Café Disco started at noon. In that time, she could pick up a litter box, more food, and maybe a toy, and stop by her landlord’s office to notify him and pay the necessary fifty bucks of additional deposit.

“Which I can’t afford very well right now,” she told the cat. “And you’ll need to go to a vet, too. And get shots, and deal with the fleas you almost certainly have. And God only knows what else.”

The cat eyed her for a moment, then stretched and curled himself up into a ball to sleep.

“I guess that’s what credit cards are for,” Michael muttered as she got up. She laid down on the futon, and listened to Tilly’s soft snoring until, a few minutes later, she fell fast asleep.

***

“Finally, it’s about damned time you’re here,” Lorca snapped as soon as she stepped into the café the next morning.

“It’s five minutes to noon.” Michael pointed at the clock. “My shift doesn’t start until noon today.”

“We’re short.” He threw an apron at her, which she caught out of the air.

“Who’s out?”

“Landry. And she’s not fucking out—she quit.”

“But—the cat’s gone. We trapped it. It’s gone.”

“I know. She sent the email from home late last night—didn’t even bother calling me up, presumably so I couldn’t curse her out. She got a job as an assistant manager at the Starbucks on fifth. We’ve been scrambling all day. You might try checking your damned messages every now and then.”

Michael looked at her phone. Sure enough, she had three missed calls.

“I’m sorry. I was running errands, and my phone was on—”

“I don’t give a damn.” Lorca jerked his chin toward the espresso machine. “Just get out there.”

Swallowing her pride, Michael nodded and went to her place. A line of grumpy, irritable people snaked around the bussing station in front of Saru, who was trying to take orders and run the register. It was going to be a long day, and there were likely to be a lot more of those in the future.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a new team member joins the Café Disco crew and brings his problems trailing after him, and Paul's life choices make Michael's life even more difficult.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [gaslightgallows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows) for a quick beta-read and encouragement.

For the next few days, extra shifts became the norm at Café Disco. The team’s schedule had already been tight, but the loss of Landry put them over the edge. Michael had to remind Lorca several times not to schedule Tilly during the blocks where she had classes, Paul got more and more irritable every day, and, to Michael’s dismay, Lorca just barricaded himself into his office making phone calls rather than stepping up and joining his team behind the counter as Philippa would have done. The calls never seemed to accomplish anything, either. Apparently all his contacts already had jobs they preferred. Michael began to feel envious of those contacts.

Finally, though, on the third day, Lorca showed up at opening with a new face at his side. “Folks, this is Ash Tyler. He’ll be joining our team.”

Ash gave a faint smile and a rather nervous-looking wave. And then Lorca said the words that sank Michael’s briefly-lifted spirits:

“He’s new to the coffee industry, so I expect you all to help him learn the ropes.”

Another complete newbie—that was the best Lorca could get for them? Michael was already scrambling to train Tilly up at the same time as doing her own duties and getting Tilly through her shift every day, since neither Paul nor Saru could apparently be assed to do more than be sarcastic or snap at her when she got things wrong, and now she’d have another working trainee on her hands as well… with presumably just as little oversight and assistance in his training from management. 

“Have you worked a cash register before?” she asked as soon as Lorca disappeared back into his office, half-dreading the answer. 

Tyler nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

Well, that was something. “Where at?”

“At a restaurant back home. A little Greek place.”

“You were a waiter?” 

“A host, mostly.” He blushed. “I was straight out of high school.”

“Did you ever make drinks there?”

“Sometimes? It was just regular coffee and soda fountain drinks, though. Sometimes a mocha, if someone got really fancy. We, uh… we mostly just mixed the chocolate syrup for the desserts into regular coffee and added cream if they asked for that.” He shifted awkwardly under Michael’s horrified gaze. “Like I said, it was a little place, and it was a long time ago.”

A headache began building behind Michael’s eyes. “Okay. What have you been doing since then?” 

“Um, I was a security guard for a while, at the mall, and then at this office building downtown. I was hoping to move up in that, but…” he scrubbed his hand through his hair. “The company went out of business, and I couldn’t find another contract to pick up. I’ve been out of work for a while.”

“And how do you know Lorca?”

“Who? Oh, Gabriel?” He pointed back to the office, and Michael, resisting the urge to snarl, gave a short nod. “I know him from the gym.”

His gym buddy. Lorca had hired his unemployed, security-guard gym buddy with effectively zero food services experience onto their team. Well, at least he was a warm body who could, theoretically, run the register. If he could manage to take money and orders and pass them on to her, Paul, and Tilly when she was available, then Tilly could do the simple drinks and she and Paul could split the trickier ones. Once he’d done his paperwork and gotten the register system explained to him. She watched as Saru led him off to start the basics, and did her best to ignore the situation while she and Paul opened.

It more or less worked, but the whole situation remained frustrating. Ash was friendly and eager to please, but his grasp of coffee lingo was thin at best, and while he was quick enough at picking up the register his manner of writing down orders was idiosyncratic and confusing to anyone who’d spent more than five minutes in a café. Under his influence, Paul yelled more than usual, Tilly unlearned some of the good habits that Michael had been trying to drill into her, and Saru remained just as irritable as he’d been before, because while a new employee _should_ have meant he could go back to making pastry most of the time, as assistant manager he was required to spend more of his time training rather than doing what he really wanted to do.

Two days later, Michael Burnham couldn't even bring herself to be that surprised when she found the new guy hiding in the back by the fridge full of extra-large vats of milk and prepared sandwiches, next to the door to the tiny employee bathroom. He was pretending very earnestly to read the Department of Health poster about proper hand-washing technique. 

"If you're confused," Burnham told him, "I'm sure Saru could give you a demonstration. Once he's done helping our customers, of course."

The mournful look in his big brown eyes almost made her feel guilty, but with the day she was having and the mid-morning rush lined up in front of the cashiers, she forced herself to squash the impulse. It wasn't fair to be nice to him just because he had the kind of eyes that deer dreamed of. Still... 

"What's wrong."

"It's..." He glanced out toward the cafe, then scooted himself up closer against the wall. "It's embarrassing."

The connection between the words and their location outside the bathroom made this sound entirely too personal for Burnham's taste (and not in the way anyone would hope for with the newbie, either, unless of course they were into that sort of thing). But a combination of perverse curiosity and sympathy with the absolutely mortified look on his face made her push. "Okay. What's embarrassing?"

"There's this customer."

"I'm not setting you up."

"God, no. Please don't."

If Burnham's curiosity hadn't been piqued before, now it _certainly_ was. "Sorry, I seem to have misunderstood. I thought you were saying you had a crush on this customer, but—"

Tyler glanced toward the cafe once more, then leaned in toward Burnham. "She's following me. I know that sounds paranoid, but--I know her. We—kind of knew each other at the gym, then she switched her gym schedule to match mine. After that she started seeing a massage therapist in the same building I worked as a guard in. And now she’s here."

"Okay, so she's got a crush on you. That's not that weird in this job. Customers see the smiles and the happy banter, they think it's flirting when it's really just professional. I hate to say it, Tyler, but you're only just noticing now because you're a guy. This happens all the time to women in the service industry. I can't tell you the number of creepy guys who've tried to get my number."

"Yeah, but..." He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, I get what you're saying. But it's not just flirting. She's kind of scaring me, honestly."

"Scaring you." Michael looked Tyler over—all six feet and change of him, broad shoulders, narrow waist, and a build that looked like he spent a fair amount of his free time at that gym he kept mentioning. Then again, size didn't always make the biggest difference in these situations. "Okay. What about her is scaring you?"

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but... I mean, she's a personal trainer. I used to be a client of hers, and she was terrifying. And then I had to quit because of money, and... then she kept offering to give me free training sessions. And she said it... like, the way she said it you could tell she was keeping it open to mean something else, you know?"

"I have a general concept, yeah."

"And now she likes to ask what I recommend out of the pastry case. And then watch me while she eats it." 

That definitely painted a picture that Michael could identify with. She'd had a few customers like that in the past. One of them had put a foot over the line once and grabbed her arm, and Philippa—God bless her—had forcibly ejected him out the door before his croissant hit the ground. "Okay. I'll write up a report to Lorca—” 

Tyler closed his eyes. "Please don't."

"Why not?"

"I need this job. He took a chance on me and—"

"And you'd rather he not know you’re upset because a girl is harassing you?"

"No, but I'd rather not have the guy I owe my job to know that I can't handle the situation myself."

Michael sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. "You've been back here reading hand-washing instructions for fifteen minutes to avoid a customer, Tyler. You _can't_ handle this by yourself. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but I'm saying—"

"Please, just don't tell Lorca. Or Saru. He'll think I'm ridiculous."

Michael snorted, on the verge of telling Tyler exactly how little she cared about what Saru thought, but—

"He’s the assistant manager, and he could ruin me here. I’ve had a really bad few months, and I really, _really_ can't afford to be looking for a new job right now."

Right. That, Michael could sympathize with. "Okay. We'll handle this ourselves. I need you to show me which one she is so that I can keep an eye on her."

"I can do that." God bless him, he sounded like he was trying to psych himself up for it. Michael couldn't decide if that was charming, or just downright horrifying that this woman had him so scared. "Thank you. Seriously, Michael, I—"

"You can thank me by getting back out there and making lattes. Go. And I'm serious, Tyler," she added, putting on as much of Philippa's old attitude as she could manage, "we _will_ talk more about this later. All right?"

"Absolutely."

The cafe was full enough that Michael couldn't begin to guess who Ash's stalker might be just from looking out into the dining room, but by watching the way he placed himself she narrowed the stalker’s location down to the far half of the tables, and after a while—looking out of the corner of her eyes while ringing up customers and retrieving baked goods—she spotted a tall, broad-shouldered woman with shoulder-length dark hair who seemed to be making no attempt to hide the fact that she was watching Ash with the same intensity as a cat watching a songbird just outside an apartment window. Under cover of passing by him to pick up a latte, Michael asked, "Dark hair, with the extra large mocha?"

"That's Laurell." Ash glanced her way, then flinched back and focused his eyes firmly on the espresso machine. 

Michael looked again as she turned back to give the latte to the customer. She wasn't exactly what Michael had expected, but she knew that wasn't fair. When she'd pictured Ash's stalker as he told the story, she'd imagined a woman who, frankly, wasn't very attractive. As it turned out, Laurell was quite pretty. Not the bone-thin model sort that movies and magazines seemed to favor, but good skin, strong curves, a healthy glow, an attractively broad, symmetrical face set with hazel eyes, and sleek, well-styled hair. She wore workout gear, but it was the fashionable kind that well-off customers often seemed to wear everywhere and at all hours. ‘Athleisure,’ a term that had always made Philippa curl her lip. She looked tough, but attractively so. It was all a bit hard to put together with the image that Ash had painted of a desperate woman driving him to terror with her attentions.

And yet, as Michael looked more closely, she saw a predatory look in the other woman’s eyes as they followed Ash behind the counter. She'd been there a long time, judging by when Michael had noticed Ash's disappearance, but her mocha was still more than half full, and her coffee cake only had a few bites out of it. She had her phone out, but it sat unnoticed by her side. No laptop, no book, no magazine... just watching. And specifically watching him. A shiver ran down Michael's spine.

"Everything okay?"

"Fine," Michael told Tilly automatically. "Just tired, that's all. We're not going to have much time to clean up before the lunch crowd shows up, at this rate."

"Perhaps," Saru said, "if you had spent more of the last hour taking orders and running the register, and less chatting in the back with Mr. Tyler—"

"He had a question about store policy."

"Did he? And is there a reason that he didn't ask Lorca—or me?" Saru pulled himself up straight, as if anyone could have missed his height, or the 'assistant manager' pin that he’d taken to wearing on his plaid button-down.

"He didn't want to bother you," Michael said. 

Tilly caught her eye and, bless her, jumped right in. "I think he's a little intimidated by you, Saru. Not in a bad way, just, you know, he's new here and he wants you to like him, since he knows Lorca respects your opinion."

Don't lay it on too thick, Michael thought. But Saru's ego was less suspicious than the rest of him, fortunately. "Well, I suppose that's fair. Just be sure you're telling him the correct information, Burnham, and do let him know that I'm more than willing to make myself available for questions. Also, have you seen Paul?"

“Not yet?” Michael checked the clock. Sure enough, Paul should have started his shift five minutes ago. Just then, the door chimed, and Paul strolled in, offering an uncharacteristically cheery wave.

“Typical,” Saru muttered. “You’re late, Stamets. Get clocked in and start making drinks. Michael, you take the register.”

Normally, Michael would have questioned that logic—it would have made more sense, as far as she was concerned, to put one of the newbies on the register and leave her and Paul to both make drinks, since they were faster and more efficient—but it would be good for Tilly to practice on the espresso machine just as long as Paul was there to help her if she ran into anything too complicated, and if she was watching him she could try to prevent Ash from writing his orders in too eccentric a style. 

She was just taking an order for a double-shot mocha when she heard a giggle behind her. For a second her mind processed it as Tilly and disregarded, but then she realized that a cascade of bright red curls stood out next to her. Tilly was on the other side of the counter, getting a pastry for a customer. The giggle could only have come from—

“Paul?” 

“Check this out.” Paul held up the cup Ash had just handed him, still giggling. “See, it’s supposed to say ‘Clint’ on it, but the l is really small and the i—”

“Oh, god, I am so sorry.” Ash went, well, ashen. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay, big guy!” Paul clasped his shoulder, then looked in wonderment at the angle of his arm. “You are a very tall man, do you know that?” He looked at Michael. “And you’re very not. Not tall, and not a man, I mean.” He laughed.

Michael snatched the cup from him and handed it back to Ash. “Rewrite that on a new cup. We don’t need it going up on Instagram with a bad review.”

“Sorry.” Ash flexed his hand, as if a cramp could possibly have been the cause of such a careless error. “I didn’t think—”

“Just be more careful next time.” She watched as he very carefully wrote out ‘Clint’ on the new cup and handed it back to Paul… who went back to the espresso machine still chuckling to himself. That… was weird. Michael had worked with Paul for a few weeks, by then, and she’d never known him to be a giddy sort of guy, or even one with much of a sense of humor. Maybe he’d just had a good morning, but she somehow doubted it. There was an air of something else about him, though she couldn’t smell any narcotic substance she recognized.

Keeping half an eye on Ash through the lunch rush meant she had no remaining attention to focus on figuring out what was going through Paul’s head—he, at least, was a good enough barista that she didn’t have to worry he’d ruin the shop’s reputation if she didn’t babysit him through every transaction more complicated than an Americano paid for by card. As the line slowed, though, she realized the drink orders were still building up. 

Warning bells went off in Michael’s mind as she looked around for the gap in the production line. Saru had gone off for his lunch break, and Tilly was scrambling through the orders as fast as she could, but Paul was nowhere to be seen.

“If this is what he’s like on a good mood, I hope I never see it again,” Michael muttered to Tilly. “Where the hell is Paul?”

“He said something about the kitchen.” Tilly handed off one cappuccino to a customer and started another. “I thought he was just getting more pastries or something, but he never came back.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, like… ten minutes ago? Maybe more?”

“Damn it.” Michael looked between them. “Ash, cover the register. I’m going to help Tilly with the backlog of drinks. If you get stuck, just call me and I’ll fix it.”

To his credit—and Michael’s surprise—Ash managed to handle the register with, if not exactly aplomb, then certainly competency and a mix of good-humored self-deprecation and natural charm that endeared him to the customers even when he fumbled, which allowed Michael and Tilly to dig themselves out of the hole created by Paul’s absence. And as soon as they were in a state that Michael felt the two newbies could handle alone together for a few minutes, Michael went looking for Paul. She hadn’t really believed the story he’d apparently told Tilly about needing something from the kitchen, but it seemed like as good a starting point as any, so she ducked back in there.

And was surprised to find Paul, with one of Saru’s baking aprons hanging nearly to his ankles, checking on something in the oven. He had a dab of some kind of batter on his cheek, and flour all over the front of his black jeans and t-shirt.

“What are you doing?” Michael grabbed the apron Paul was wearing and hauled him away from the oven. 

“I was baking,” Paul informed her, infuriatingly serene. His eyes, strangely dark in his nearly albino face, narrowed faintly before widening again. “You seem really stressed, Michael. You should take a break. Have some tea. Can I make you some tea? All this coffee is terrible for us, it makes us so high-strung.”

“What’s making my high-strung right now is not coffee, it’s wondering why the hell you abandoned your station, left Tilly alone trying to keep up with the lunch-rush coffee orders, and, apparently, made some kind of unauthorized disaster in our kitchen.”

“Oh, it won’t be a disaster, though. I promise.”

“You’re not a professional baker, Paul! That’s what we have Saru for! Nobody comes here to get… half-assed cookies or brownies or—” A horrible thought surfaced in Michael’s mind. She grabbed Paul by his shoulders. “You didn’t put anything in whatever that was, did you?”

Paul tilted his head and squinted at her. “Of course I did.”

“Paul—”

“Eggs, flour, cinnamon—”

“I’m not joking around, Paul!” Michael couldn’t resist anymore—she shook him. “Did you put anything _illegal or otherwise illicit_ in whatever the hell you made back here? Because you have been acting seriously weird all day, and I _know_ you’re on something.”

“I’m high on life; you wouldn’t understand,” Paul muttered, his annoyance almost a comfort after hours of dippily vague serenity. 

“I could go right back there and call Lorca, you know.”

“…Okay, I might also be high on some special pot that our neighbors gave me. And maybe some… slightly psychotropic mushrooms that my lab partner at grad school is studying. It’s legal in a bunch of states, now, you know!”

“Psychotropic mushrooms?!” 

“Well, no.” He looked faintly ashamed of himself, which was nice of him considering that he was making Michael wish she’d never got out of bed that morning. “Pot. But I didn’t put any in the coffee cake, okay? Of either. I’m not nearly that generous.”

“ _Good._ Come on, we’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“The urgent care clinic down the road. Your boyfriend works there, right?” 

Paul nodded.

“Then he can deal with you. You’re going to tell him what you did.”

“I hardly think that’s necessary—”

“It’s that or I call up Lorca and tell _him_ what you did.” Michael crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t know him very well yet, but I get the feeling he’s not the kind of guy who’s very _laissez-faire_ about drug use, especially during work hours.”

“ _Laissez-faire._ ” Paul snickered. “Big words from a barista.”

“I have layers. Make your decision.”

Paul actually considered it for a moment, staring up and squinting at the lights in the dingy kitchen ceiling. “Okay. I’ll tell Hugh.”

“Good.” 

“I’ll go over there right after my shift—”

“Uh-uh. We’re doing this right now.”

Paul sighed. “Okay, okay… just let me get the coffee cake out first. It should be done any—” 

The timer on the counter chimed.

“Perfect timing!” Paul flashed a brilliant, annoyingly cheerful grin, extracted himself from Michael’s grip, and bustled over to the oven to remove the offending baked good from the oven. It smelled… insanely good, actually. 

Michael was in no mood to let that change her feelings, though. “Okay, it’s out. Come on.”

With a fussy expression, Paul shook the loaf out of the pan onto a cooling rack, then covered it with a clean towel, took off ‘his’ apron, and hung it up on the hook by the sink, and only then presented himself and said, “Okay, fine. Now I’m ready to face the music.”

Michael took him by the arm and started to lead him out the back door. 

“You don’t get it, do you? It’s because Hugh is really into opera.”

“That’s hilarious,” Michael assured him drily. 

Just as they reached the door, however, it opened from the outside, and Saru stepped in. “Where are you two going? You both still have hours left on your shifts.”

“We’re going to see Hugh,” Paul announced before Michael could interrupt him. 

Saru’s eyes went wide, and Michael could see an impending scold, accompanied by long citations written to Lorca. 

“Paul isn’t feeling well,” she said smoothly, squeezing Paul’s arm just a little on the side of him that his body blocked from Saru’s vision. “So we’re taking him to the urgent care clinic to see if his boyfriend can sneak him in for a quick look. To make sure he’s not contagious.”

“Hmm. And can he not manage that by himself?”

“I’m—ow— _really_ not feeling well.” Paul screwed his face into a believable expression of discomfort, undoubtedly helped along by the grip Michael was maintaining on his arm. “Dizzy. Stars in my eyes. The whole bit. I might vomit at any moment. Or faint on the sidewalk.”

Saru drew back, visibly unnerved, but nodded sharply. “Go on, then, Burnham. But get back here as soon as you can. And bring Mr. Stamets if he’s not… contagious or otherwise a danger to himself or others.”

“Thank you, sir.” 

***

As it turned out, the clinic was pretty quiet that afternoon, so Hugh—who turned out to be a tall, attractive man with medium-brown skin and a calm and soothing manner that Michael found very pleasant—was indeed able to sneak them in for a quick consultation right away. 

He was also decidedly displeased when he heard why they were there.

“What the hell, Paul? The pot is bad enough—”

“It’s legal in a bunch of states now!”

“So is alcohol, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to show up drunk at work! You _promised_ me that you would take this job seriously. If you’re going to get through your master’s degree program, I need you to be doing at least _some_ work, otherwise we’re going to get behind in both of our student loans, and—and the pot isn’t even the point! _Mushrooms_ , Paul? You don’t even know what they would do to you!”

“They’re perfectly safe,” Paul muttered. 

Hugh folded his arms over his chest. “How do you know that?”

“Because my lab partner took them first, and he was fine!” 

“I’ll… just give you two some privacy.” Michael edged toward the door, averting her eyes from Hugh’s expression.

“I appreciate that, Michael.” Hugh’s voice was still very calm, but it was kind of calm that said that he was holding onto some serious anger with a very tight leash. “It’s very nice to meet you. Please tell Paul’s boss that I need to run some more tests before I can be sure he’s safe to work in food-handling.”

“Absolutely.” 

“Don’t let Saru throw out my coffee cake,” Paul said sadly as the door shut behind her.

Michael shook her head and returned to Café Disco via the back alley. She couldn’t even begin to feel sorry for Paul—he’d gotten himself into the situation, after all, in every sense of the words—but somehow she did find herself faintly regretting that his good mood that day had been the result of such unfortunate (and illegal) circumstances, and that he was likely to be in an even worse mood than usual for a good while in the future. 

And any chance of them being friendly was _definitely_ shot, now, since she was the one who’d made him come clean to his boyfriend.

 _I’m not here to make friends_ , Michael reminded herself firmly. _I’m here to work_. But that philosophy assumed that a person made friends elsewhere, and ever since Philippa and the rest of the gang at the Shenzhou had gone out of her life (minus Saru, of course, who she’d begun to think she might never escape), Michael hadn’t had any alternatives. She’d never been good at making friends in school, and now… it seemed that had stuck and become a lifelong handicap. 

As she pushed open the door into the back room of the café, she saw that the coffee cake was gone from the counter. Well, that was the perfect end to a shitty day. She’d just have to tell Paul she hadn’t made it back in time to save it from Saru’s temper. Even back at the Shenzhou, he’d always hated when anyone else touched things in his kitchen. Anything more than taking milk and other necessaries out of the fridge was likely to get you passive-aggressive lectures and scolding and complaints to Philippa, who would sigh and smile and indulge him, and then share a fond eye-roll with Michael and remind her that pastry-chefs were more artists than mere bakers or food staff, and were allowed to have their little quirks. If he pushed it too far she’d scold him, but—

Michael paused on the line between the kitchen and the behind-counter serving area. Saru was handing a customer a slice of something that looked very familiar. 

“Is that the coffee cake?”

“It is.” Saru thanked the woman and saw her off with a smile, then turned his back to the dining room and leaned down close. “Where did that come from?”

“I—”

“You can’t possibly have made it. I remember the time you tried to make scones at the Shenzhou, they were tough and lumpy.”

“Thanks. I wasn’t going to say that I made this.”

“Then who did?” Saru demanded.

“Paul. Before he got sick,” she added quickly, when horror washed across Saru’s features. “The doctor is pretty sure he’s not contagious, but he needed to run some more tests just to be sure Paul’s safe to come back on shift.”

“Oh, thank god. But how—no. I won’t even ask. But what recipe did he use?”

“Why?” Michael stared, astounded. This wasn’t at all the reaction she’d expected Saru to have. 

“Because,” Saru said in a manner that said he was trying very, very hard not to reveal a stronger emotion, “it is _apparently_ very good. I don’t know why anyone would order something as simple as coffee cake when there are _mille-feuille_ and _eclair_ and _religieuse_ to be had, but… the whole loaf is gone. So it appears that I should make more in the same style.”

“I… I don’t know where he got the recipe, but I’m sure he’ll tell you when he gets back—”

“I’m sure I could figure it out on my own, of course, if there had been any left for me to test.” Saru drew himself up, managing to look arrogant and pained at the same time. 

“Of course you could have,” Michael agreed vaguely, because any other response (or lack of response) would have been met with a snit that would last for the rest of the week, if not month. 

“I didn’t have the chance before it was all devoured.” He stared off into the distance. “It was that popular, Michael. What am I doing with my life if a coffee cake was that much more popular than what I make?”

He seemed to have forgotten that he was bent on hating her, at least for the moment, so Michael dredged up a bit of sympathy for the high-strung pastry chef. “Some people really like homey food. And for lunch, coffee cake has a little more substance than pastry. And it was new. People like to try the new thing. I’m sure it was nothing personal.”

“Perhaps.” He glanced around nervously. “But Lorca stopped by to drop off some paperwork, and he tried it, too. He said we would definitely have to keep it around. I need that recipe.”

Michael was trying to think how Philippa would have reassured Saru, when she spotted Paul coming out of the back room. He had a small bandage on his arm, as if from a blood draw, and he looked significantly less chipper than he had that morning. “Here we go,” she said. “We can solve this right now. Paul, what did you put in the coffee cake you made this morning? Saru wants the recipe.”

“I don’t know.” Paul slouched up to the espresso machine and leaned against it. “I was just messing around.”

“Messing around!” Saru sputtered. 

But before he could get up a good head of steam, a cough from the register behind them drew the collective attention of the Café Disco team. As she turned, Michael had a moment to note that Ash had disappeared from the register, before she realized why. Laurell had thrown a studded leather jacket on over her athleisure getup, and was looming over the counter with a friendly but still faintly unnerving expression. 

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but I was wondering if I could get a slice of that coffee cake that everybody’s talking about, to go?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Paul tries to make coffee cake again, Michael's foster father shows up for a visit, and Michael has an uncomfortable realization about her feelings toward Ash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for how delayed this chapter has been! I realized that I needed to fill in a few gaps in my outline further on before I wrote this, just for my own sanity. However, now the entire story is outlined, so I can safely say that unless I have some crazy spark of inspiration in the next month or two that extends it, this will be ten chapters, and I know (more or less) exactly what will happen in all of them. Hooray!
> 
> Relatedly, this chapter might be coming in a bit short, but the next one looks likely to make up for it.

“You don’t understand,” Paul said, his pale face flushed. “I am trying. But I don’t remember what I did!”

“It’s coffee cake,” Saru snapped. “It cannot possibly be that complicated. Just tell me what you added to make it different from a normal coffee cake.”

“I don’t know! It’s not like I’ve made coffee cake a hundred times, okay? I don’t even remember what a normal coffee cake recipe would be, let alone what I did while I was—”

Michael, standing next to Saru, widened her eyes and raised a hand to make a ‘cut it out’ gesture at the level of her throat. 

“Sick,” Paul said, with only the faintest audible pause. “I must’ve been a little delirious, I just… threw things into a bowl. Besides, you’re the baker! You ought to be able to figure it out!” 

“Not without tasting it!” 

“Okay, okay, this isn’t helping.” Michael placed herself between the two men to give them both a little room to breathe. “The last few days have been stressful for everyone, but we can get through this. Like you said, Saru, it should be simple – it’s just coffee cake. So run us through what you would normally put in a coffee cake, and maybe that’ll jog Paul’s memory.”

Saru scowled and crossed his arms over his chest, but complied. “One and a half sticks of softened butter, exactly two cups of sugar, three cups of sifted flour, four teaspoons baking soda—”

“Wait.” Paul put up a hand. “Did I use baking soda? Maybe I didn’t. Could that be it?” 

“If you hadn’t used baking soda,” Saru informed him, “the coffee cake wouldn’t have risen. It would be a disaster.”

“Oh. I guess I must’ve, then. Carry on.”

“This isn’t going to work. And I’m too busy to go through an entire recipe out loud with you.”

“You won’t be if we keep getting demands for more of the coffee cake I don’t know how to make,” Paul muttered once Saru had stalked out of the kitchen to the front of the café. 

“None of us are going to be in a good situation if people keep demanding this coffee cake and not getting it,” Michael reminded him. “Lorca said we needed to get this sorted this week.”

“Lorca doesn’t know that I was stoned out of my mind when I made it.”

Michael pressed her lips together. “We’ll figure something out. Keep thinking. Look up some recipes on your break, okay? I still think if you go over enough normal recipes that mght shakes something loose.”

“Like my will to live?” 

“You’re the one who got us into this. I’m sure you can—”

“Michael?” Saru stuck his head back into the kitchen. “You have a visitor.”

For a brief, wild moment, Michael hoped that maybe Philippa had returned from California at last, and decided to forgive her for the mistakes that had led up to her departure. But then how would she have found—

“He says he’s your father.”

Michael’s heart sank. She had, if possible, even less of an idea of how Erik would have found her, but since it seemed unlikely that anyone else would pretend to be him… “I’ll be right there.”

“You’ll take your lunch break early, too,” Saru said pointedly. “And can I expect to have my kitchen back at any time this morning, Mr. Stamets? I’d love to make actual pastries for our customers.”

“You’d love to make something they like better than my coffee cake, too. But you can’t.” Paul sighed. “You can, however, have the kitchen back, since I have no idea what I did with the stupid cake. I’ll keep thinking about it,” he assured them both before they could protest. “But for now, if Michael’s going on her break, you need _someone_ out there who knows how to make anything more complicated than a hot chocolate, so don’t even think about telling me to stay in here until I figure it out.”

It was, Michael reflected as she followed Paul out into the front of the café, sort of nice to have the normal Paul Stamets back. In a way. 

Nicer, for instance, than seeing Erik standing, awkwardly stiff, in the middle of of the café’s waiting area. He looked up from his phone when she entered the room. 

“Michael. It’s gratifying to see you again.”

“Likewise.” Michael bent and grabbed a salad and a San Pelligrino out of the cold case. She caught Ash’s eye. “I’m going on lunch, can you ring this up as my employee meal for the day?”

“Got it.” 

At the other register, Tilly’s expression said that Michael was going to be getting questions about Erik later, when she came back, but there was nothing to be done about that. She grabbed a fork from the self-serve station, and waited a few more seconds until Erik had his plain Americano, no room, then led him to a table as far from the counter as she could get them. 

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Your mother was worried.” Erik sipped his coffee. “She saw the news about the Shenzhou some time ago, and declined to mention it to me at the time out of concern that we would be… ‘smothering you’ if we contacted you right away. But after a few months with no further news, and no calls from you, and after she determined that the Shenzhou was closed permanently, she decided to ask that I look into matters.”

That sounded about right. “How did you find me?”

“I went to your apartment. Your landlord was kind enough to provide the address for your current employment when I indicated I was not sure of it.”

He’d implied that he knew, then, but had forgotten the exact location. Well, that was nice. She couldn’t exactly complain – they were her parents, and they were listed as the emergency contacts on her lease. It wasn’t as if her landlord had told a stranger where she worked. Not quite, anyway. 

“The news article that I read about the incident at the Shenzhou indicated that you were taken into police custody. At least I presume that you were the only assistant manager of the shop—”

“I was.” Michael stabbed a piece of lettuce with her fork. “Philippa handled it.” 

“Your mother was very concerned.”

It did not escape Michael’s notice that Erik did not bother claiming to have shared her concern. 

“I am surprised,” he continued, “that you would not take the opportunity presented by the Shenzhou’s closure to change careers. You have finished your business degree, have you not?” 

“I haven’t.” 

“For what reason? The last time we talked, you had only two quarters left to complete—”

“That was before the Shenzhou closed. I was supposed to take one last quarter, but I couldn’t afford it at the time, and while I was temping I didn’t have the schedule flexibility to finish up anyway.”

“You should have told us.” Erik ran his fingers around the smooth edge of his coffee cup. “We could have paid for the last quarter, and covered your rent for those months if that was what was required.”

Michael shook her head. “You don’t need to be paying two college tuition bills at once.”

“Community college night classes are hardly as dire an expense as the university. We could have afforded it.”

The old familiar twinge tugged at Michael’s stomach, and she pushed her salad around in its clear plastic box, suddenly not even a little bit hungry. The plan had always been for her to go to university, too – to follow in her parents’ footsteps and go to the same school they’d worked for as professors and researchers before they died. The same school where they’d worked with Erik and Amanda. The same school her foster brother, Leonard, was now attending. In high school, she’d dreamed of going there and studying anthropology, or maybe astronomy – maybe both. But her application to the university had been declined. The one university she applied to, the one she’d been sure her whole life that she would attend, and they’d turned her down. 

She hadn’t had the nerve to apply anywhere else after that. Philippa had pushed her a few times, suggesting that she apply again, or maybe even go to another university, even out of state, but she had refused. Erik and Amanda had brought it up even more, but Michael had just insisted that she was happy at the Shenzhou, and didn’t know what she’d want to study anyway. They were already disappointed in her, so it did no added harm for them to think of her as lazy and happy in her own mediocrity. 

They’d been thrilled when she admitted she was taking night classes to get her business degree. Now that was just another thing for them to be disappointed in in her about.

“I’m fine. I’ll go back as soon as everything’s settled here.”

“I was under the impression you had been employed here for two months, now.”

Michael gritted her teeth. “Yes, but we just lost a long-term employee, and the only person the manager could find to replace her was a total newbie who’s never worked in food services before. And before you ask, yes, it really _can_ be complicated enough that that’s a problem. Not everyone who comes into a coffee shop orders a plain Americano.”

Erik pressed his lips together. “Perhaps they should.”

“Perhaps. Look… I’m fine. I really am. I’m keeping busy, I have friends, I even got a cat. And I haven’t been arrested even a little bit since the whole situation at the Shenzhou, so… let’s just let this go, okay? Can we do that?” 

“Of course. If that is what you would prefer. Amanda would very much like it if she could see you soon, however. We’re having dinner with Leonard on Sunday—”

“I’ve got work.”

“Does the café not close early on Sunday evenings?”

“This one actually doesn’t. Erik, just… I’ll try to figure something out for next month, okay? And I’ll call her next week. I promise. But—” Michael glanced up and, for once, was relieved to see the familiar look of faint panic rising on Ash’s frustratingly emotive face. “I need to get back. The new guy is getting swamped.”

“You’ve hardly touched your salad.”

“Just not really hungry. I’ll put it in the back fridge for later.”

Erik nodded, finished his coffee, and stood. “I’m gratified that you have recovered yourself from the crisis, Michael. If something should happen again, do not hesitate, this time, to contact us.”

“I won’t,” Michael lied, and shook his hand. “Say hi to Amanda for me.”

“Of course. I will also tell Leonard how you are.”

Since ‘please don’t’ wasn’t a reasonable option, Michael just nodded and went back to the counter. 

Tilly leaned over from the espresso machine as she washed her hands. “I thought Saru said you were having lunch with your dad.” 

“I was.”

“…You shake hands with your dad?”

“He’s a very formal person.”

“Yikes. I don’t feel so bad, now, for my grade school friends who had to call their dad ‘sir.’” 

Leonard called Erik ‘sir.’ Michael had honestly never considered the possibility that it might be strange. “I thought Paul was supposed to be on drinks so that you and Ash could run register?” 

“He was, but he disappeared a little bit ago.”

Michael forced herself to remember that grinding her teeth was a bad habit. “When was this?”

“Uh, a couple minutes ago?”

Michael grabbed a drink order from the stack. Mocha with an extra shot of espresso. Easy enough. She grabbed the chocolate and got to work. “Around the time Ash started looking like his eyes were going to pop out of his head?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Tilly grinned. “At least he’s cute when he freaks out.”

“Is he?” 

“Like you haven’t noticed.” 

The wink was maybe a bit much, but Michael was too busy—and too relieved not to be talking to Erik anymore—to be annoyed. “I’m not interested in dating coworkers.”

“Well, with the schedule you’re on it’s not like you’ll meet anyone else. And it’s not like you’re his boss, or he’s yours.”

“It makes things awkward.”

“Only if they don’t go well…”

“I’m not really into dating in general, if you want the truth.”

“If it were me, I’d make an exception for him. I usually go for musicians? But there’s something about him…”

Michael glanced back at Ash, who was laughing with a customer over having misunderstood her order. His whole face got into the act of smiling, and he was so totally unencumbered by anything like arrogance or unwillingness to admit his mistakes.

“I mean, mostly it’s the smile? And the eyes. But he’s also got a really great—”

“Are we talking about Mr. Gorgeous over there?” 

“Paul!” Michael whirled. “Where the hell have you been?”

He drew himself up to his full height—just barely taller than Michael herself, and puffed with an unwonted pomposity, all of a sudden, that almost reminded Michael of Saru. “On break.”

“You were supposed to wait until I was off lunch before you took your break,” Michael reminded him. “Tilly was trying to make all the drinks herself, and Ash was alone on register.”

Paul waved a hand vaguely. “It’s good for ‘em. Anyway, I think I figured out how to solve the coffee cake crisis.”

“You remembered what you put in it?”

“Ehhh, not yet. But let’s just say that in about… oh, five minutes? Or less? I should be in the right frame of mind to either remember, or at least to make another few batches. At least that’s how I’m hoping this’ll work out,” he added with a beatific smile that Michael found all too frustratingly familiar. 

“You—no. No, Paul. You can’t _do_ that! You can’t be—” Michael glanced around, grabbed a drink cup, then turned on the espresso machine so it would cover their voices. “You can’t just get stoned at work!” 

“I can, and I will. Just until we can figure out this whole coffee cake thing, jeez. Don’t flip out on me! I took the exact same dose as last time, and I’ll just tell Saru that I remember what I did, go back there, and make another batch. He’ll want to watch, so we can figure out what the whole thing is all about, and bam—Bob’s your uncle, no more problems.” His eyebrows drew together. “That’s such a weird phrase. I don’t get what it has to do with anything. But I got it right, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Bob’s your uncle. Or, no, maybe he’s mine?”

“It doesn’t matter. Here, Tilly, triple-shot for… John. Paul—you cannot let Saru see you baking like this. He will fire you. Besides, he’s on lunch.”

“I can wait. And he can’t fire me.”

“He can tell Lorca to fire you. And if Lorca finds out you’ve been working—and _baking_ —while stoned off your ass, you can be damned well sure that’s exactly what he’ll do. Okay?”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Fiiiiine, but how are we going to get the coffee cake thing figured out, then? I already took the dose, and if last time is any indication I won’t remember what I did if I just make the damned thing.”

“Damn it.” Michael gritted her teeth and looked around the café. “Okay, fine. Don’t tell Saru. I’ll sneak back there as soon as I can, and you can tell me while you still remember, okay? But the lunch crowd is still going strong, so you’re going to have to make it yourself. Just… try to write things down as you think of them, okay?” 

“Okay. Yeah,” Paul nodded, “that makes sense.”

“Do you think you can handle making a few drinks until then?”

Paul looked down at his hands. “I’m not sure.”

“Fine. Just go back there. Saru’s on his lunch break, so you should be safe in the kitchen for at least another forty-five minutes. That should give you enough time to get it into the oven.”

“Great! Cheerio!” 

Michael watched him duck back into the kitchen, regretted not taking his boyfriend’s card so that she could have called him as a warning, then went back to work. There was nothing else to be done, anyway, and the lunch rush was bad enough without them being down a man. 

Fortunately the crowds were pretty light that day, and a while later she was about to slip back to check in with Paul when she recognized the next woman in line. It was the business woman from her last day temping. And today she was wearing a badge on her belt. 

“I know you, don’t I?” the woman asked when Michael waved her up to the register. “Not from here. Somewhere else. Another coffee shop.”

“The chain shop on Fifth,” Michael agreed. “I’m not working there anymore.”

“So I gathered. I’d like an iced americano, please. Sixteen ounce, room for cream and sugar.” She continued watching Michael as she input the order. 

“Sorry, I don’t remember the name?”

“Katrina. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t expect you to remember, after all this time. Though you might be seeing more of me. This place is pretty close to the precinct office.”

“Do you want a discount card, then?” 

“Sure, thanks.” 

Michael told her the total, then stamped the card. When she handed it to Katrina, however, she didn’t just step away. She was still staring. “Is there something else?”

“You used to work at the Shenzhou Tea and Coffee House, didn’t you? You’re the one who got caught up in that fight.”

Michael was grateful for her dark complexion, which made blushing a lot less obvious. “Yes. That was me.”

“Got it.” Katrina smiled. “I thought you looked familiar not just from that one day at the other shop. Thanks. I’ll be seeing you around, I guess.”

This time, Michael made personally sure that she got her iced americano in a reasonable amount of time. She wanted absolutely no other reason for a police detective to be paying attention to her, or to the shop, and the entire time Katrina was standing there flipping through something on her phone while she waited for her drink, Michael was terrified Paul would come back out of the kitchen and make some kind of scene. Blessedly, he did not, and she took her iced drink with a little raised-cup-salute and went out the door. 

By the time all of that was done and Michael had worked the line down to a reasonable level for an escape, Saru had returned from his lunch. She made as if to go back toward the kitchen, but he caught her eye and shook his head very firmly.

Michael glanced up at the clock. Unless he’d fallen asleep on the counter or forgotten how spoons worked, Paul must have put the coffee cake in the oven by now. It would either work or it wouldn’t. 

“Where is Mr. Stamets?” Saru demanded a second later. “He should be out here.”

“He thought he remembered what the trick was with the coffee cake, so he went back to make it while it was still in his head.”

“Hmph.” Saru pushed back from the register. “Well, I had better go back and make sure he isn’t disrupting my kitchen, then.”

There was no reasonable way that Michael could stop Saru from entering his own proper domain. She caught Ash’s eye. He seemed to understand.

“Mr. Saru, I’m sorry,” he said, stepping in front of Saru, “but I had a question about my schedule next week.”

“We can talk about that later.”

“I know, but I’d really rather talk about it now, with you. It’s… delicate, and I wanted to get it handled without Lorca knowing. Is that okay?”

Saru looked torn. 

“I can check on Paul,” Michael assured him, already on the move so that he wouldn’t have a chance to say no. “You deal with this, since it’s a manager thing. I’ll make sure he cleans up after himself.”

As she passed Saru’s shoulder, Michael glanced back and willed her gratitude to show in her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed. Ash gave a fractional nod, and his lips curved ever-so-slightly, secretly upward in a way that made Michael’s stomach give a traitorous flip. A smile shouldn’t have been able to do that. But it did. 

The kitchen, at least, provided a much-needed distraction from her inconvenient feelings. There was flour everywhere, and seemingly every bowl and utensil had been dirtied, but the smell was heavenly, and, as she watched, Paul removed first one and then another cake pan filled with gorgeous, golden-topped coffee cake. 

“I’m so glad you remembered, Paul—Saru is really tense out there. He almost came back here himself, I had to get Ash to distract him.” Michael leaned in over the pan, breathing in the warm, cozy scent of cinnamon and butter. “So what’s the secret?”

“I don’t know. I wrote it all down, though. Everything, while I was still… ‘in the zone.’” Paul looked around. “Now I just have to find the… here it is!” He lifted a dripping mixing bowl off the table to reveal one the paper bags they put pastries in for takeaway orders, scribbled all over with Sharpie marker. He rubbed a little batter off it, and lifted it up triumphantly. “Our problems are solved!” 

“Great.” Michael sagged in relief. “We need a win. Read it off to me.”

“Uh… uh-oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh?’ You wrote it all down. It’s right there.”

Paul looked at her, then back down at the note. “Well… it starts out okay. ‘Turn oven 350, 1.5 butter, 3 flour, 3 lonely eggs, 1.2 milk.’ I think I meant 1.25, there, since there’s no measure that works out to 1.2. But after that, it gets a little… weird.”

“What do you mean, ‘weird.’”

“Well… it says I should keep the eggs sunny, then put pie bits in the topping. Then it says the pie sugar—”

“What pie sugar? There’s no special sugar for pie.”

“I know. That’s what I’m saying, this is really weird. It says the pie sugar goes into the fluffy stuff along with the brown friends. I have no idea what I meant there. I have no idea what I meant with the whole rest of this thing.” 

“Give it to me. It must just be your handwriting.” Michael snatched the paper from him, but she could make even less sense out of what was scrawled on the bag than Paul had. “This looks like… it says to make fluffy clouds in the sky before you add to the sunshine?’ ‘Make sure not to sad the—’ Goddamn it, Paul!” 

“Saru says he needs you both back up front right—um. Or I could just tell him you’re busy.” Tilly’s eyes went wide. “It’s okay, I’ll just tell him you’re busy.”

“Don’t.” Michael put a hand on her arm. “You’re a student, you must read a lot of weird scribbles from your professors and TAs. Can you make any sense out of this?” 

“’Bake until nothing in the world is scared anymore?’ What the Hell—I mean, heck?”

“No one cares if you swear, Tilly. Just as long as the customers can’t hear you.”

“What the Hell, then?” She stared fixedly at the writing for a minute, then experimentally began to rotate it clockwise. 

“Is that helping?” 

“Not really? But… it’s not exactly making it any harder to read, either? Is this the coffee cake?” 

Michael sighed. “It’s as close as we’re getting today, apparently.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael has visitors over, Lorca leaves Saru in charge for a week (and everyone almost immediately regrets this fact), and a new business moves in down the street.

“So, wait, I have a question.” Ash took a slice of pizza out of the box on Michael’s coffee table. 

Ripper, who had been watching the proceedings with intense interest up to this point, hopped up on the coffee table and headed for the unguarded food. Michael quickly swooped him off the table and closed the top of the box. “No pizza for you. Go on,” she added, returning her attention to Ash.

“Well… I mean, it isn’t really my business, but it seems weird that you didn’t get accepted by the university. Right?”

Tilly nodded emphatically, her red hair bouncing, then swallowed. “I was thinking the same thing. I mean, from what you’ve said you got better grades in high school than I did, and… I’m no slouch in the homework department, y’know? I got almost straight As, except for Spanish and AP Government. And almost nobody got As in AP Government.”

Michael laid a paper towel over her slice of pizza to soak up the grease, then tossed it in the garbage. “Actually… I did.”

“See! That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t make sense that you’d get rejected, especially since your parents were professors there before the accident.” 

“The tests were probably easier when I took them. I’m older than you, remember.”

“Yeah, but we’re about the same age,” Ash pointed out, “and I don’t remember a lot of people getting As in AP Government at my school, either. One or two, maybe. Nobody I was close with, for sure. I, uh… I wasn’t the most devoted student.”

Tilly patted him on the shoulder. “We forgive you.” 

“It doesn’t really matter why it happened,” Michael lied. “What matters is, I didn’t get in.”

“Yeah, but…” Tilly pressed her lips together and looked at Ash. 

He nodded slowly. “Leonard did. And… he got a really good package of financial aid, didn’t you say?” 

“Yeah. I mean for someone whose parents work at the…” Michael frowned. “No. That… Erik and Amanda wouldn’t have done that.”

“Are you sure? Because… like I said, it’s none of my business, really. But I was kind of watching you guys while you talked, and he looked guilty.”

“Ashamed and embarrassed,” Michael corrected. “He hates that I’ve wound up doing nothing with my life. At least back when I was assistant manager at the Shenzhou he could be kind of proud of that – management’s better than just being one of the grunts. But now…”

“No, no.” Ash redirected Ripper, who was crawling into his lap with feigned affection and obvious intentions about his pizza. “Look, I know I’m kind of a shitty barista, but I was a _good_ security guard. I could always tell when people were up to something, and that was because they looked nervous. People shouldn’t look that nervous walking into a normal office building. A little, maybe, if they have an interview or they’re dealing with a lot of legal problems or something, but not _really_ nervous. And they shouldn’t look nervous at all having lunch with their adopted daughter. But Erik did.”

“And maybe baristas should be paying more attention to the customers lined up in front of them than they should to the one customer and coworker having lunch on the other side of the room?” Michael suggested. “Come on, Ripper, give it up. Nobody’s going to give you their food. You have your own over there.” 

“In his defense, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer pizza to cat food, too. Even if I was a cat.” Tilly rubbed her hands dry on a paper towel, then petted the disappointed cat. He twisted away from her touch to lick her fingers. 

Ash blushed a little and focused on his pizza. “I didn’t mean to spy on you or anything weird.”

“It’s fine. I’d just think you’d be sensitive to the idea of people getting watched at work, what with the whole Laurell situation.”

“Yeah.” He shifted awkwardly and sipped his beer. “My new schedule must not work very well with hers. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“She’s… not all bad.”

“She’s stalking you, Ash.” Michael gave him a look. “That’s bad enough.”

“Yeah. I know. Just… I don’t know that she actually means any harm by it, y’know? She’s just kind of—”

Unfortunately, Ripper chose that exact moment to hop directly onto the pizza box. The momentum of his jump from the sofa pushed the box partway off the edge of the table, and only Ash and Michael’s combined quick reflexes, grabbing the box and the cat respectively, kept everything from tumbling onto the floor, and pizza from getting everywhere. No doubt Ripper would have been thrilled to help clean up, but the mess of grease, cheese, and pizza sauce all over her carpet would have been a trial even for Michael’s somewhat obsessively-maintained collection of cleaning supplies. The last dregs of Tilly’s beer did get spilled, though, so more paper towels had to be retrieved, and the pizza box moved into the kitchenette while the spill was sopped up and the carpet under that edge of the table carefully blotted. 

“You really are a hazard, you little monster,” Tilly informed the cat as she cuddled him, more than a little bit against his will. 

“Are you sure you don’t want him?” Michael muttered, only mostly kidding. 

“I’m sure.” Tilly kissed his gray head, then gave in to his protests and set him down on the floor, where he stalked several feet away from her, tail high, before sitting back down and regarding the small party with disdain and disapproval. “My mom’s allergic. Even as it is I’ll have to throw my clothes right into the laundry when I get home, or she’ll get all stuffed up and grumpy.”

“You’re not missing much, trust me. Except vet bills, pet rent, destroyed house plants…” Michael trailed off, looking at the now-empty pot of the miniature rose Philippa had given her some years back, which Ripper had chewed on, then knocked off the counter, causing the potting soil to go everywhere. It hadn’t survived his first month in her apartment, but she still couldn’t bear to get rid of the pot, which was a gleaming turquoise. 

Tilly picked up a little sparkly ball with a bell in it and jingled it a few times to get the cat’s attention before throwing it. He darted off in pursuit. “You love him, though.” 

“I’m not sure why, sometimes. But I do.”

“I should go.” Ash stood up and stretched. “You want a ride home, Till?”

“Yes, please! Just let me go to the bathroom first. Beer.”

“You’re okay to drive?” Michael asked, eyeing Ash carefully as she gathered up plates to go into the dishwasher. “You can both stay over, if you’re not.”

“I’m fine. I only had one all night, remember?” He lifted the empty bottle as proof. “I’m pretty sure the pizza alone handled that, let alone the two hours we’ve been sitting here.”

“I could make some coffee…”

“I’m fine, Michael. I promise. Scout’s honor.” 

“You were in scouts?” 

“Eagle Scout, thank you very much. Just because I didn’t finish college doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything with my time… or that I’m going to drive drunk.”

Michael blushed and took the bottle from him. He’d peeled the label off. “You know that’s not at all what I meant.” 

“Sorry.”

“I just worry.” 

“Too much,” he confirmed. “But you don’t have to. At least not about this, okay? I’m good.” 

For half a second Michael felt as if they were frozen – closer than she’d thought they were, Ash looking down at her with an expression of almost painful sympathy and a warmth that made hands tingle. Then the bathroom door opened and she jolted backwards like a kid caught by her parents. 

“I should, ah, head that way, too, for a second, before we go.” Ash retreated and ducked into the bathroom, leaving a starry-eyed Tilly looking back and forth between them in his wake. 

“So?” she hissed as soon as the door was closed again. “Was that—”

“It wasn’t anything.” Michael bent and picked up the ripped-off label from Ash’s beer, then took that to the trash and the bottle to the recycling. “I was just making sure he was okay to drive.”

“I’m not sure you’re qualified to give a breathalyzer, but I wouldn’t blame you for trying,” Tilly joked. “I could say I changed my mind and just call a Lyft—”

“That’s not going to change anything.”

“It could if you asked him to stay!” 

“What? No!” Michael gaped, horrified by the sudden reminder that a girl six years younger than her was almost certainly more romantically experienced. “We haven’t even been on a _date!_ ”

“You already know each other! Who needs a—”

Michael hushed her firmly as the door opened, and gave her a dire look that she hoped spoke ‘Mention anything about him staying over and I will destroy you’ clearly enough to be read even by Tilly’s over-enthusiastic mind. 

“Ready?” Ash caught sight of the girls’ expressions, and froze. “…Or did I interrupt something? Should I… go back in there? Or out in the hall?”

Tilly didn’t even stop laughing as she hugged Michael goodbye and herded him toward the door. 

***

The next day, Monday, was Michael’s day off, and she spent as much of it as she possibly could not thinking about Ash Tyler. She cleaned Ripper’s litterbox, and then the rest of her apartment. She went grocery shopping, then made lunches and dinners for the week, put them in Tupperwares, and tucked them in the fridge and freezer. She wrote four drafts of an email to Philippa, none of which she sent, then called Amanda and spent an awkward hour talking with her before making her excuses and spending two hours in the tiny, airless exercise room in her building. Then she came home, watched the news, and read until bedtime. 

That Tuesday was a late start for Michael – one of the few days she didn’t have the be there before opening – and by the time she arrived it was clear that the day already wasn’t going great. Ash didn’t even look at her as she came in, and Tilly greeted her with a tight-lipped expression that looked more like an apology than like anything like a real smile.

“Thank God you’re here.”

“What happened?” Michael looked out into the sitting area. “Was it a bad morning? Everything looks fine now…” 

Tilly dismissed the quiet, unassuming customers with shake of her head. “Not because of them. Because of… remember, this is the week Lorca’s out for that eye surgery he’s been talking about?”

“Right.” Lorca had notified everyone the week before that he’d be unavailable, and that, as such, Saru was in charge if anything requiring a manager came up. “That shouldn’t be so bad. Lorca wrote the schedule before he left. Saru can’t have messed things up too badly yet.”

“You, uh… you’d think not. But…”

“What happened.”

Tilly looked back to the kitchen, then sidled up close to Michael. “Well, it started with just being… y’know, Saru. Yesterday he was _all_ over Paul, wouldn’t leave him alone for a minute, insisting he give him the recipe for that coffee cake. Paul finally claimed he felt sick and left early. Then Saru started watching every drink I made, because he said a customer had complained that her mocha wasn’t right, and so he wanted to make sure I was following company procedure.”

“Okay… Did he find anything you were doing wrong in his opinion?” 

“No, but it was _all afternoon_ like that, with him just hovering over everything I did, waiting for me to make a mistake. But that’s not even the worst. Ash, tell her what happened.”

Ash shook his head, but it was clear he was rattled – his skin was more the color of his name than its usual dark gold tone. 

Michael went over to him. “Tell me.” 

“It’s… I only got here an hour ago. But when I got in, Saru said it was unprofessional of me to have my girlfriend coming in looking for me, and I should have just told her what my schedule was so she wouldn’t bother people at the register.”

The dull sound of his voice filled in the blanks that his story didn’t outright say. “…No.”

“Yeah.” He ran a hand through his hair and hunched over with his elbows on the counter. “Laurell came in this morning looking for me. She introduced herself to Saru as my girlfriend, and asked for my schedule. And he gave it to her.”

“ _Damn_ it. That’s not – no. That’s literally not okay. He can’t be doing that.” Michael glanced back, then out at the customers. “I’ll talk to him. We’ll redo your schedule for the week.”

“No, don’t—”

“This isn’t right, Ash. If she’s got your schedule, she can not only come in here any time and… ogle you all she wants, literally force you to make small-talk with her at the register, but she could wait for you outside when you’re leaving.”

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, Michael. I don’t think she’d really do anything bad. I really… I think I just overreacted before, you know? You were right. Everybody else in the service industry deals with this stuff. I’m just not used to it.”

“Bullshit.” Michael shook her head. “This could be dangerous.”

“She’s not going to jump out from behind a car and attack me.”

“She might! And even if she doesn’t, that’s not the point. What would you be saying if some guy had done this to Tilly?” 

“Of course I’d be furious, but that’s—”

“It’s not different, Ash. He shouldn’t be giving out _anyone’s_ schedule to a non-employee. End of story. And since he did, the only thing to do to make it right is to change your schedule so you’re not at risk anymore.”

Ash dug his hands into his hair and hung his head over the register. “I get what you’re saying. But seriously, I don’t think Laurell is really a danger to anybody. Including me.”

“I don’t really care if you _think_ she’s a danger, Ash—”

“Uh, guys? Michael?” Tilly’s voice, high with near-panic, cut through Michael’s frustration. “We’ve got incoming.”

“Right. Sorry.” Michael straightened and drew a steadying breath. 

“I was afraid you wouldn’t hear the bell on the door,” Tilly explained apologetically as a group of four business people came in through the door, chatting among themselves.

Michael had to admit, at least to herself, that she probably wouldn’t have. She was upset – far more upset, if she was honest, than was totally reasonable for the situation, although the situation _was_ legitimately upsetting. But mostly, she was worried about Ash. 

As she made drinks for the next hour or so, she mulled over the problem, running it through her usual best filter for problem-solving: _What would Philippa Georgiou do?_ Unfortunately, giving Saru her dirtiest look, sighing, and shaming him into personally rewriting the schedule and presenting it to Ash with an awkward but heartfelt apology really wasn’t within Michael’s powers. Saru had respected Philippa – he’d even had a healthy fear of her, since she was his boss and the arbiter of whether or not he would continue to work at her shop. He’d thrown his temper tantrums from time to time, and Philippa had accepted that with bemused patience, but he’d always _respected_ her. And that, back when Michael was Philippa’s right hand, had meant at least a nominal amount of respect for her, too.

He had no reason to respect Michael anymore. If she told him to rewrite the schedule, or demanded he let her do so, he’d just tell her she was overreacting. He might even find a way to turn the situation against Ash, whose situation was even more desperate than Michael’s. At least, in the worst case scenario, she could fall back on Erik and Amanda. She didn’t want to, but she could. Ash’s mother was dead, and his father was out of the picture. He didn’t have anyone to turn to but himself. 

When the tide of customers fell quiet again, Michael went over to him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you what to do. It’s your problem. If you’d rather we not talk to Saru about it, that’s your choice.”

“Thanks.” He stretched, his shoulders bowed from bending over the register. “It sucks that it happened, but it’s just this week. I really think it’ll be okay.”

“Okay. Just… let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“You’ll walk me out to my car?” He grinned. “Keep away the big, scary bogey-woman?”

“It wouldn’t be the first fight I’ve gotten into. Hopefully this time won’t land me in a holding cell again.”

Ash laughed. “Yeah, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. I’d be really embarrassed if it did and I couldn’t afford your bail. I can handle myself tonight when I leave… but I wouldn’t mind some company for lunch?”

So once Saru was done doing the baking for the day, and Tilly had taken her break, and Paul had arrived for his shift, (at least moderately sober, Michael was glad to see, though she’d learned not to expect that would last), they made their entirely-legitimate escape... and Michael tried very hard not to think about the wink and thumbs-up that Tilly shot her as they left. This was not a date. It was just colleagues getting lunch. She’d done that with Philippa a dozen times, back in the old days. It didn’t mean anything.

The way Ash’s hand brushed against hers as they walked, however, might. Possibly. She wasn’t sure. It was so casual it might have been an accident, but, then again…

“I overheard some customers talking about a new place that does salads and wraps and stuff just down the block. Want to check out the competition?” 

“Sure, that sounds good.”

“I don’t think they do coffee, so we’re probably safe. Might get a little relief on the lunch rush, though. And maybe they’ll buy lunch there and then come get coffee from us.”

“Maybe.” As they reached the end of the block, Michael slowed and read the brand-new, hand-painted sandwich board out on the sidewalk. “’Your Neighborhood Nutritional Palace?’”

“…Or we could find somewhere else.” Ash frowned. “I don’t know, that just sounds kind of… awkward.”

It did, a bit. It looked a little awkward, too. The whole place was painted in warm shades of orange, red, and purple, and there were Indian-esque wall-hangings and mandalas hung up all over the place. But a bunch of people were seated inside, eating with all visible signs of happiness and contentment, and as they stood there, doubting, two young women stepped out. 

“Hey, is this place any good?” Ash asked.

“It’s wonderful!” The taller of the two flashed a smile that was nearly incandescent against her very dark brown skin. “We just stopped by on a whim, but we were really impressed.”

“And they’re a religious organization,” the red-head added, tipping down her silvery sunglasses against the outdoors. “Everything above their operation costs goes toward funding meditation retreats and mindfulness classes that they hold at their spiritual center.” 

“Okay, cool. Thanks!” 

The girls waved and walked away. 

“Well, they seemed… happy enough? I don’t mind looking for somewhere else, though, if this is a bit much for you?”

Michael looked around. A pizza place, a Subway, a hotel restaurant that she suspected would be well over Ash’s budget, and a Mexican place that seemed to always be full no matter the day or the hour were their closest other options, and they were running short on break time. “Let’s just try it. If it’s terrible, at least it’s better than eating another of our own salads. We’ve seen how long those sit in the case.”

Inside, Michael’s impressions were still a little mixed. The décor was a little too hippy-dippy for her, and the white girl with waist-length dreadlocks who led them to their table seemed a little too into the cosmic peace aura of the place, but the menu looked great, at least if you didn’t mind all-vegetarian and mostly-vegan fare, and the prices were more than reasonable. The falafel wraps they both ordered were sizeable and filling, and, at least to Michael’s mind, surprisingly delicious. 

“I’ll get it,” Ash said, taking the bill even as the waitress set it down. 

“You don’t have to.”

“Come one, you’ve been saving my butt every day since I hired on at Disco. I can at least buy you lunch.”

“Okay.” Michael forced herself to smile, even as the discomfiting uncertainty she’d felt earlier came back with a vengeance. Did that mean this had been a date after all? Was she going to have to ask Tilly? 

“Oh, we didn’t order dessert, though.” 

Michael snapped back into reality to see the waitress taking Ash’s money and setting down a plate between them.

“Compliments of the house,” the waitress said. “This is our brand-new blueberry coffee cake. Welcome to our family!”

“That was… a little creepy. But, hey – free coffee cake.” Ash handed Michael one of the two forks on the plate. “I guess they’re just trying to get people hooked, since they’re new in the neighborhood. Smart move.”

“Very smart.” Michael took a bite. “…And lucky for us. Taste that.”

He did. “Wow, that’s _amazing_.”

“Remind you of anything?”

Ash’s brows drew together. “Like… oh, damn, you’re right. It _does_ kind of taste like Paul’s coffee cake!” 

“This could be the answer! We can get Saru to come over here and eat this, and then he’ll be able to figure out what the secret is. Or if he can’t do it by taste, maybe he can talk to whoever makes it here, baker to baker, and find out what they use!” 

“Yeah… one problem though.” Ash looked grim. “They’re using this stuff as one of the big draws for customers, right? Offering it free, sure, but… they’re not gonna want the place right down the block to have the same stuff, are they?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Café Disco crew deals with a problem customer, Saru considers a career change, and Michael and Ash's first date doesn't go very well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, sorry this chapter took so long! Vacation, work deadlines, and some emotional nonsense delayed it, but I hope it's worth the wait.

Tilly nudged Michael’s foot with her own. “He’s here again.”

Michael drew in a calming breath and finished the half-caf soy latte she’d been making, then sized up the customer who was coming through the door. The customer, Harry, had been causing Tilly problems all week, but this was the first time his visit hadn’t coincided with either Michael’s day off or her breaks. He wasn’t much to look at – white male, brown hair, stocky, on the short side of average – but just watching the way he sauntered across the café floor she could tell he was a problem. Philippa would have called him an ‘experience.’ The circumlocution sounded polite and business-positive until you heard her say it – in her voice it had been tantamount to a curse word. And from everything Tilly had said, this guy deserved every ounce of that connotation. 

“Just do what you do,” Michael told Tilly in an undertone. “You’re good at being nice and friendly to the customers. Don’t let him rattle you. Then you let me handle the rest.”

“But he always asks for something different—”

“I can handle whatever he can throw at me. You just worry about keeping the front end of the transaction what it should be.” 

“I’ll try…” Tilly drew a deep breath through her faintly tight smile, then turned up the wattage as Harry approached the counter. “Good afternoon, and welcome to Café Disco! What can I get you?”

“I wasn’t planning on ordering fries, so tone it down a teensy bit, Red.” Harry flashed a smile that was as grandiose as it was unfriendly. “And I would like a _ristretto_ , if you think you can manage it. _Un café serré, en francais_. Also, a slice of your coffee cake, and a bottle of sparkling water. Chilled, no flavor.”

“Are, um… are those two first things the same thing, or—”

He made the face of an artist confronted by mass-market tchotchkes for the first time, then closed his eyes for a moment before saying, “Yes, dear sign of the failure of our educational system, they are indeed the same thing. One is the Italian word, and the other—”

“Is French. I got that part, I just… you know, wanted to make sure.” Her cheeks brilliantly pink, Tilly pressed her lips together, then forced herself to smile again. “I’ll just get your soda water and your coffee cake while Michael makes your drink.”

Harry mimed a shooting gun with his fingers. “Wise choice, my darling dimwit. Although if you’re going to wait for another male colleague to arrive, I hope I won’t be waiting long.”

“You won’t, sir.” Michael took a demitasse out of the cupboard and set it under the espresso machine. “I’m Michael.”

“I see. How very avant-garde of you.”

 _Ristretto_ was hardly a common order, but it was one with which Michael was more than familiar. In principle it was simple enough to achieve – the same amount of espresso coffee that would go into a normal shot, extracted with about half the amount of water in the same amount of time. It required a finer grain than normal, and produced a more concentrated shot of coffee, but one which, according to its adherents, possessed fewer of the standard coffee compounds and a bolder, fuller, and less bitter flavor. She carefully measured out the coffee, and paid close attention to the extraction to make sure everything was right. 

When she finished, she handed him his drink, and he sipped from it right in front of the counter. “Mm. Close.” He took another delicate sip, presumably to raise the drama. “But not quite right. You let a little of what should’ve been the second pull in, and that’s not a proper _ristretto_.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Inwardly, Michael bristled. She would have given that _ristretto_ to Philippa without a qualm, and Philippa’s standards for espresso, as with everything else in her shop, had been nothing short of exacting. “If you’d like me to try again—”

“No, no. This is close enough. I suppose I can’t expect better at a place like this. A refund will be fine.”

Michael shook her head. “I can remake the drink, sir, but I can’t give you a refund for something you’re going to drink.”

“Ah, but,” he raised a finger, gleefully didactic, “that only works if you can actually make the drink I ordered.”

Michael glanced aside at the orders piling up from other customers, then forced a smile. “Let me try again, _please_.”

She took back the first _ristretto_ , set it aside – where she could test it herself, later – and then went through the whole process over again, taking as much pains with the drink as if she were back at the Shenzhou, and she was going to take it back to Philippa in her office. As she worked, Saru came out of the back and, raising an eyebrow and pressing his lips together at the hold-up, stepped in and began making drinks himself. She’d catch hell for that later. He didn’t like to get pulled into drink-making. Whatever.

Nothing went wrong. The drink, Michael would have sworn in a court of law, was perfect. But Harry took a tiny sip and winced. “I’ll have to have that refund.”

This time, at least, there was no question of whether to go and get a manager. Hearing the magic word, Saru drew himself up, brushed off his apron, and approached the counter. “What seems to be the problem, here?”

“I ordered a _ristretto_ , and your employee tried twice to make it, and failed twice.”

Saru glanced at Michael. Much as he disliked her, he knew better than anyone the unlikelihood of her making a drink incorrectly. “We’d be happy to make you something else.”

“I don’t want something else. I want a _ristretto._ If I can’t have a proper one, I want a refund.”

“I told him I am happy to refund his money, but he can’t keep the drink if he claims it’s not drinkable.”

“And leave me with just water and my coffee cake? I don’t think so. I paid for a _ristretto._ This isn’t one, so I get my money back, _and_ my… espresso.”

“What’s going on out here?”

Michael and Saru both flinched at the sound of Lorca’s voice.

“This customer would like a refund, but he would also like to keep his drink,” Saru said.

Lorca looked at the customer, then at the drink, then at the identical drink sitting on the barista side of the counter. “What’s the hold-up? Give the man his money.”

“But—”

“Just do it, Saru.” Lorca flashed a smile at Harry. “I hope next time we can meet your standards, sir, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.”

“You’re very welcome,” Harry assured him as the register popped open and Saru handed him back his money. And he wandered away to his table, whistling to himself. 

“What was it supposed to be?” Lorca asked, looking at the demitasse again.

“ _Ristretto._

“A what?”

Michael tilted her head curiously.

“You know what? Forget it.” He shook his head and headed back toward his office. “Just don’t make a habit of it.”

“You did great,” Tilly assured Michael as soon as Lorca was out of earshot. “He usually lectures me for ten minutes about what an idiot I am, when I make his drink. So you must’ve gotten it perfect if that was all he could manage.”

“Some people just don’t want to be happy,” Michael agreed. But the statement, true as it was in customer service, didn’t come near to satisfying her. She prided herself on perfection – she should have been able to satisfy even a customer who didn’t want to be satisfied, if she was really on her game. And while she could usually take customers’ flak philosophically, Harry’s attitude got under her skin. 

It was also odd that someone who owned a coffee shop didn’t know what a _ristretto_ was. But, then, not everyone was Philippa Georgiou.

“I’m going on lunch,” Saru informed them with a grim expression. “Try not to lose all our income while I’m gone.”

“And that wasn’t fair at all.” Ash glared after Saru, then picked up the demitasse and, with a shrug, sipped it. “I don’t know what that guy was talking about, anyway. This is pretty good. Different, but in a good way.”

Michael took it from him and drank, too. “That’s what a _ristretto_ is supposed to taste like.” She handed it to Tilly. 

“Show me?” 

So Michael went through the process with her – dry, this time, without actually making anything, because they didn’t need to be wasting yet another pull of espresso and making _another_ drink that no one would be paying for. 

Customers came and went. Paul arrived, pupils wide and glassy, and went straight back into the kitchen to make the day’s coffee cake. He no longer seemed to enjoy coming to work stoned, though he was still cheerier on the drugs than off, and at least he hadn’t lost whatever knack he possessed that way that failed him when he was sober. The coffee cake was still one of the biggest draws Café Disco had going for it. And, despite gentle prodding, neither Michael nor Ash had yet been able to coax the recipe for the strangely similar coffee cake out of the staff at Your Neighborhood Nutrition Palace. Though they had had a number of good, cheap lunches there, and one awkward meditation workshop where the owner encouraged them to open themselves up to the universal love of the cosmos. Michael hadn’t been able to look Ash in the eyes for most of a day after that incident.

Michael called out the name on the last latte, handed it to the woman, and realized that Ash had been talking to her. “What?

“I was thinking we could go out dancing. If you want.” He stretched, then leaned his forearms on the counter. “There’s a new club downtown, and I’ve heard it’s not too crowded yet but they have good music, and good drinks. Tonight maybe? It’s a Wednesday, so it won’t be too busy, and we both have late days tomorrow.”

“That sounds…” Michael struggled to remember the last time she’d been out dancing. It couldn’t possibly have been high school, could it? The thought was too horrifying. She tried to picture herself in a sweaty, drunken crowd of men wearing too much cologne and women wearing too little of anything. But Ash looked so earnest and endearing. “Interesting.” 

“If you don’t want to… I just, I thought maybe a movie, but there’s nothing good out right now, and it’s hard to really get to know somebody at a movie.”

It was hard to get to know someone while dance music pounded through every pore of your body, too, but Michael was finally coming to grips with the idea that when Ash talked about getting to know her, he might not just mean conversation. And she might be glad of that fact. 

“No, I’d like that. It’d be fun. We should all go.”

As soon as she said ‘all,’ Ash’s face fell. 

“Not, like, Saru and Lorca, I mean. But you and me, and Tilly, and maybe Paul and his boyfriend. He’s a nice guy, and he works too much. It would be nice to see him outside the clinic. And it’d be great to hang out with you, too, of course. I just mean… We should all have fun.”

At least, Michael thought, she had the pleasure of knowing that for once she wasn’t the only one uncertain about what was going on between them. After that display of verbal panic, Ash nodded vaguely and, for once, went willingly back to his station at the register, waving the next customer to come through the door over to him with enthusiasm. Anything was better than dealing with Michael, apparently. She couldn’t blame him – she felt about the same at that moment.

“What the Hell was that?” Tilly hissed, pulling Michael a little ways away from the registers while Ash helped the woman through their varied pastry options. “You can’t say he wasn’t definitely trying to ask you out on a date this time!”

“I know! I panicked.” 

“Michael…”

“I haven’t been on a date in _years_. And it wasn’t like I did it a lot even before that. Especially not out to things like dancing. My speed was always more like… study dates. Or going out free first Thursday at a museum.”

“Oh my God.”

“Please come?”

“You’ll be better off alone.” Tilly shot her a look. “You _want_ to be alone with him, don’t you?”

“Yes, but not… I don’t do this kind of thing. I don’t know _how_ to do this kind of thing.”

“Then it’s time to figure it out!” 

Michael looked back toward the register and caught Ash craning his neck to watch them. They both looked away from each other quickly. “Please. Just come along with us. As moral support.”

“Okay, okay… Fine. But if I find somebody of my own to dance with—”

“Then you can feel free to abandon me.”

“I wouldn’t really.” Tilly hugged her quickly. “We have to stick together. But I reserve the right to at least wander off for some heavy making out.”

They returned to work, and everything soon settled down into, if not exactly peace, at least an approximation of such desperately maintained by two people who really did not want to talk about their issues in the middle of a coffee shop, surrounded by both their coworkers and their customers, and one person who wished they would but had to admit it probably wouldn’t be the smartest business decision. 

About an hour later, though, Michael realized that one of the afore-mentioned coworkers had been absent for quite a while. 

“Has anybody seen Saru lately?”

Paul, who had emerged some time ago bearing the latest batch of coffee cake and drunk a double espresso to help him sober up, screwed up his face in perplexity. “I thought it was his day off or something.”

“He was here earlier. He went on lunch just after Harry was here.”

Paul gave a theatrical shudder. “Can’t blame him for not wanting to come back after that.”

Michael frowned. “Me either, but it’s not like Saru to overstay his lunch break.” She still had his number in her phone from when she’d been the assistant manager at the Shenzhou, so she texted him with just, “Been a while. You OK?” A few seconds passed, then the message reported it had been viewed. Three dots appeared to indicate he was responding, then disappeared.

Reappeared… and then disappeared again. Then, nothing.

A customer came in. Michael put her phone away quickly and made their drink, then the next customer’s, and the next. When at last she was free to look at her phone several minutes later, there was a text from Saru from only a few seconds prior: “Will BBS.”

“Well, he’s probably not dead,” she muttered to Tilly as they restocked the sandwich case. “Although it is possible he’s been kidnapped by someone with more lackadaisical texting style than he usually has. Back in the old days you’d have to wait while he painstakingly ticked out full sentences complete with proper punctuation, and he’d give a lecture on the fall of civilization to anyone who used an emoji in his presence.”

He hadn’t lied, though – when he appeared from the back of the café, only a few more minutes had passed since his message.

“What happened, Saru? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I was just having lunch down the street. At Your Neighborhood Nutrition Palace. Have you been there yet?”

“Yeah. Ash and I have been a few times.”

“This was my first time.” He shrugged out of his jacket and stretched, tipping his long neck from side to side. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? So calm and welcoming! I’m sorry I was late coming back, but I got to talking with the waitress, and then she brought the owner over, and I talked with him as well, and I lost track of time. Their philosophy is truly inspiring.”

“Yeah, the food’s really good. And cheap.” Ash, who had wandered over when Michael said his name, watched Saru with a curious expression. “What were you and the owner talking about?”

“Oh, everything. Do you know all of their staff, from the owner to the busboys, each maintain an equal share of the company’s stock? And they buy all their produce from local, independently-owned farms?”

“That’s… really great.”

“It is. Everyone there has full medical insurance, and they’re working on getting a dental and vision plan. And any of the staff, even the part-timers, can attend any of their wellness or meditation seminars for free.” 

“It sounds like you’ve been learning a lot about their employment practices,” Michael said slowly. “I wouldn’t have thought… They don’t seem like the kind of place you’d be at all interested in.”

“Perhaps not some years ago. But… everything that’s happened since the Shenzhou closed has made me think. Philippa took good care of her staff. She cared about everyone, and she respected my talents. The work was hard, but the environment was soothing. Here, though…” Saru glanced toward Lorca’s office door, which was firmly closed, and lowered his voice. “The stress has been getting to me. All this nonsense with the coffee cake, and… as assistant manager, I have noticed some irregularities.”

Michael’s stomach clenched. “Irregularities?”

But Saru moved on without clarifying, lost in his own starry-eyed reverie. “Your Neighborhood Nutrition Palace is a type of workplace that I never imagined could exist. Not just soothing, but nurturing. Nourishing the body, the mind, and the spirit. They’ve asked me to join their family.”

“They say that to everyone who goes there,” Ash pointed out. “They told Michael and I that when we went to lunch the first time.”

“Yes, but they mean it. And they asked me on specifically as their new pastry chef.”

That was not good. 

“Have you decided?” Michael asked.

“I’m considering. It would be a significant cut in pay, but I believe it might be worth it for philosophical, personal, and spiritual reasons.”

Michael was quite certain that was the first time she’d even heard Saru say the word ‘spiritual,’ but now was not the time to bring that up. “What about Café Disco?” 

“Lorca will find a new pastry chef, or he’ll order in from one of the larger bakeries like most cafés do. The kitchen here is too small, anyway, and none of the customers care about my work nearly as much as they do Paul’s coffee cake.” Saru gave an affronted huff. “Be realistic, Michael – would any of you even miss me?”

Michael thought of all the times they’d fought back at the Shenzhou. Of how he’d argued against Lorca bringing her on, and how standoffish he’d been when she joined. Of his overwhelming ego and need to be seen as above everyone else, his paranoia, and his fussy, pretentious manner about absolutely everything. 

But with Philippa gone, he probably – horrifyingly – counted as her oldest friend with whom she was still in regular contact.

“Of course I would.”

“We all would,” Ash added. 

“Well, I appreciate the attempt at sentiment, but I find it a bit hard to believe. But this transition will be for the best, for me.” Saru sighed. “Everywhere else I’ve ever worked, I’ve felt like I’m constantly running to prove my worth. As if I always have to be afraid. House-made pastries are the first thing a café or restaurant cuts back on if they’re running into trouble. But there… it’s different. They have a different philosophy. I can tell just from talking with the owner that I wouldn’t feel afraid anymore.”

“If that’s true, then I’m glad for you,” Michael said. 

“Thank you. And I’d be glad to see you come with me – both of you,” Saru added, nodding to Ash before returning his attention to Michael. “I know we’ve had our… differences, since the incident at the Shenzhou. But I do care about you, Michael. I want you to be happy.”

“Thanks. But… I don’t get the sense they really need a barista there.”

“Perhaps not yet, but as they grow the franchise—” Saru broke off as a group of customers came in. “We can talk more later,” he assured her quietly, then turned his attention to the newcomers. “Welcome! Can I interest you in a delicious pastry, fresh from the oven?”

It certainly seemed as if just the thought of moving over to the Neighborhood Nutrition Palace had improved both his mood and his customer service. Michael watched Saru out of the corner of her eye while she made the group’s drinks, and she hadn’t seen him this cheery and good-natured in, well, ever. What was good for Saru was likely going to be terrible for Café Disco and the rest of its employees, though, and Michael couldn’t shake the memory of Saru’s blasé reference to ‘irregularities.’ He’d always been wound a bit tight, though – maybe he just meant that Lorca wasn’t as organized as Philippa. Not many small business owners were… 

The rest of the shift dragged on as if it would never end, and yet seemed to pass in an instant. Paul agreed to the invite, and promised to drag Hugh along just as soon as they were both off-shift since they both had late shifts that day. Michael drove Tilly back to her house to drop off her school things and change, and completely ignored Tilly’s insistence that she should change, too, or at least put on a little bit more makeup. Tilly’s parents, blessedly, were not home. “They’re at some work thing,” Tilly explained with a shrug. The house was huge, and Michael was reasonably sure her friends’ parents would not have appreciated her going out dancing with her older coworkers. 

When they arrived at the club they found Ash waiting at the door chatting with the bouncer, who turned out to be a friend from his last job. He was huge, and very dark, and made Ash look small and slight by comparison, but he smiled when Ash greeted Michael and Tilly, and waved them all through without paying cover. Passing by the waiting line made Michael a little nervous, but Tilly seemed to enjoy it, and Ash offered his arm to her, so she went with it. 

Inside, the club was dark and so loud that Michael could feel the bass beating in her sternum. She immediately regretted her decision to agree to the outing. But they were already inside, and Tilly had spotted Paul and Hugh at a table, and Ash was leading her through the crowd with a firm grip on her hand. 

They ordered drinks, and chatted for a while, then Tilly accepted an invitation to dance – with a broad wink and a nod at Michael behind Ash’s back. 

“Do you want to dance, too?” he asked as Tilly disappeared into the crowd.

“I… I don’t know.”

“As in you don’t like dancing, you don’t want to dance with me, or…?”

“Neither, it’s just… I think I’d like another drink.”

“Oh.” For half a second, Ash looked disappointed. He covered it well, though. “Sure, let me get that for you. Another gin and tonic?” 

“That sounds great.”

“I could use another as well,” Hugh said, standing up. “Same for you, Paul?” 

“Yeah, thanks.” Paul watched the two of them go, then turned to Michael. “Just curious, but are you _trying_ to get rid of the charming Mr. Tyler?”

“No.” Michael slumped. 

“Well… you’re doing a great job of it, regardless. If you really hate dancing that much, maybe you should have just asked him out for drinks?”

“It’s not that. It’s just… it’s been a really long time since I dated anyone. And I’ve never dated seriously. At all. Or casually, for that matter. And—”

“This is a lot of ands before the alcohol shows up.”

“I’ve never felt like this about someone before.”

“Ah.” Paul scooted closer and leaned in so they could talk more easily over the music. “As in you think you could have real feelings for him?”

The thought made Michael’s throat close up, but she nodded. 

“The good news is, from the way he watches you I think you’ve got a good chance that he feels the same.” Paul tossed back the last of his drink. “The bad news—and I say this as someone who is well aware that they’re dating above their weight in the looks _and_ professional department—is that if you don’t give him some kind of solid indication that his feelings might be reciprocated, you’re likely to lose him to someone less gorgeous but more willing to snap up a good catch when they see one.”

“I see your point.” Michael toyed with her glass. “Hugh’s very handsome, but I wouldn’t say you’re outclassed there.” 

“That’s kind of you, but consider: he’s a doctor. And I’m… getting stoned four times a week so that I can make coffee cake.”

“You’re almost done with your doctorate, though, aren’t you?”

Paul made a face. “Yes, and the thought of the red-hot job market for mycologists is getting me sweaty just thinking about it. Not to mention the hordes of attractive men panting to catch someone with a PhD in fungus. Somehow that’s not quite the same kind of date-magnet as someone who cures people’s actual ills for a living, and does it looking like he walked off job modeling beachwear in the Bahamas. I burn if I take too long walking around the block. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, he’s made a move—he asked you out tonight. You… invited your work friends along. That poor, gorgeous son of a bitch is standing in line with my husband right now, wondering whether you’re too polite to tell him you’d rather just be friends.”

Michael sighed and dropped her head back against the wall of their booth. “So what do I do, then?” 

“You make a move back. Let him know you’re interested.”

“And if I’m terrible at making moves?”

“I’m not saying follow a dating guide, I’m saying put yourself out there. Be yourself.”

“So, awkward and emotionally unavailable? Are you sure you aren’t stoned right now?”

“What, and you think I’m Casanova reborn?” Paul gestured at himself. “We’ve met, haven’t we? The first time I met Hugh, I told him to stop singing along with his headphones public, and that his taste in music was terrible.”

“…And that worked?”

He shrugged. “Not really, but it got a conversation started—an honest one, even if it wasn’t a terribly romantic one, and we were eventually able to make something out of that. So… tell him something true. Be real with him. And let him know you’re interested, before someone else does. And for god’s sake, dance with him. There’s no point being out at a dance club if you’re just giong to sit in the corner all night.”

Michael nodded slowly. “I’m scared. I never… dancing isn’t really my thing.”

“Good job. Openness looks exactly like that, only at the guy you like, not at your gay friend.” Paul patted her arm. 

Michael, who had been unaware until that moment that Paul considered them friends, filed this away as an unexpected but, on consideration, welcome piece of information.

“That’s okay, it’s scary making yourself vulnerable. Here – get up for a second.”

“Why?” 

Paul rolled his eyes. “You’re scared of dancing, right? So dance with me first.” He pulled her to her feet in front of the booth and guided her with hands on her shoulders, then her hips. “Just relax. It’s not rocket science, just… let your body move with the music. Nobody here is expecting competition-level tango.”

“And what if there’s a slow song?” she asked after a few minutes of getting used to the faster beat.

“That’s easy.” Paul tugged her in against his chest, her right hand in his left and his left hand on her waist. 

“And we just…”

“Just rock with the music. Look, if you’re really worried, just drink more. That always makes dancing easier.”

“Are we interrupting something?” 

Michael jumped at the sound of Hugh’s amused voice. 

“Just got bored waiting for you two and decided to dance a bit.” Paul took his drink and pulled Hugh into a kiss, then draped his arm around his waist.

Michael accepted her gin and tonic from Ash. She looked from him to it, hesitated, then tossed it back. “Once you’re finished with yours, I’d like to dance.” 

***

The next morning, Michael was jolted awake by sun shining onto her face from a window that definitely wasn’t hers. A large, cheerful stuffed whale stared her in the face, and behind it hung yellow curtains she didn’t recognize.

Definitely not her apartment. As she remembered a bit more of the night before, she was glad to realize it almost certainly wasn’t Ash’s, either. But then where…?

“Good, you’re awake!” 

“Ow.” Michael rubbed her temple. 

“Sorry.” Tilly handed her a cup of water and two Tylenol. “Do you think you can handle some breakfast?”

Her stomach roiled. “Eugh.”

Tilly made a sympathetic face and patted her on the shoulder. “Yeah, I know. But some carbs and protein would do you good. I tried to get you to eat last night, but you kept saying something about… I don’t know, really. You weren’t making a lot of sense. At one point I’m pretty sure you were talking about the asshole guy at work and his stupid coffee drink, but there was a lot more I didn’t catch.”

Carefully, Michael rolled herself to a sitting position, took the pills, and drank the entire glass of water. Slowly. It had been a long time since she’d had a hangover, but her stomach made it very clear that drinking slowly was a good idea now. Too bad it hadn’t had the same certainty the night before.

She was wearing a cheap lei of fluroescent plastic flowers, and had no memory of where it had come from. She picked at the flowers uncertainly. They looked like they would glow in the dark. “How much did I…?”

“No idea, honestly.” Tilly took back the glass and patted her thigh fondly. “Hugh noticed you were getting a little worse for wear around one in the morning and came and found me.”

“What about—”

“I’m not totally sure that Ash doing that much better than you? His buddy the bouncer knew his address, so he packed him off into an Uber at the end of the night.”

“And you brought me back to your house?”

Tilly blushed. “Yeah, well, I didn’t know your address, and you weren’t really in a state to tell it to anyone. And Ash wouldn’t go home until I promised him that I’d keep an eye on you.”

Michael groaned. 

“I thought it was nice of him…”

“No, it is, I just… it’s so stupid. I was so nervous being on a date for the first time in years that I drank so much I don’t remember very much of the date.”

“Oh.” Tilly frowned. “Well… that’s too bad. Because, um…”

“What. What happened.”

“You guys kissed. We thought it was super cute at the time—”

“Who’s ‘we’?” 

“Paul and Hugh and I. We were keeping an eye on you guys, like I said. But… it’s kind of sad that you don’t remember your first kiss.”

Tilly didn’t have any classes that day, so after Michael had washed her face in cold water and tried to regain some semblance of humanity, they took the bus downtown to get breakfast. To Michael’s surprise, Tilly wanted to go to the Neighborhood Nutrition Palace.

“I know they’re weird, but they have really good bagels. And that coffee cake… I mean, it’s just as good as Paul’s, without the weirdness of knowing he has to be stoned out of his gourd to make it,” Tilly said as they walked to the shop.

“I don’t disagree that it’s good. But I think it’s likely whoever makes it there is just as stoned as Paul is when he makes it,” Michael said. “I think they all are, if you want the truth.”

“You think?” Tilly frowned. “That would make sense, I guess. All that peace and love and openness to the universe…”

“They’re not bad people, just kind of weird. And I can’t imagine Saru really being happy there for more than a month, no matter what he thinks.”

“Saru’s thinking of going to work there?”

“Don’t tell him I told you so, but—oh no.” Michael stopped in her tracks. 

“What? Are you feeling sick again?” 

“No, but I think we’re going to have to find another place for breakfast.” Michael pointed.

There was a line in front of the Neighborhood Nutition Palace that stretched around the block. A few of the people in line were customers that Michael recognized either from Café Disco or from previous visits to the restaurant, and some looked like the normal hippy types that the Nutrition Palace attracted, but a lot of them dressed like they’d just come from the gym. 

And one of them, Michael saw with a sinking feeling, was Laurell. 

“Let’s go.” Michael tried to catch Tilly’s arm and turn them away, but it was too late. Laurell had already spotted them. 

“Hey! You’re from the café down the street, aren’t you? The one Ash Tyler works at.”

Michael gritted her teeth. “That’s us.”

Laurell flashed an unnervingly cheerful smile as she broke from her friends and approached them. “You’re his friend. Adrian or something, wasn’t it?”

“Michael.”

“Right! Look, he hasn’t returned any of my calls, and I feel bad about where we left things.”

Michael opened her mouth to say that Laurell _should_ feel bad, but the next words out of the other woman’s mouth stopped her dead. 

“Just tell him that I forgive him, okay?”

“For what?” she asked, suspicious. This was a new wrinkle in Laurell’s stalker-credentials, to be sure, and it made Michael feel very uncomfortable. Something wasn’t right. Either Laurell really was completely delusional, or…

“Maybe I was wrong.” Laurell ran a hand through her shoulder-length brown hair and shook her head. “I shouldn’t have got so mad at him the last time we talked. And maybe he was right that it was time we broke up, that’s all. Just tell him that. Okay?”

Dazed, Michael nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

“Great, thanks. Aren’t you going to the Nutrition Palace?” Laurell asked when Michael started to turn away. “I love this place. They have the absolute best vegan protein shakes.”

“What? Oh.” Michael’s stomach, which had finally started to settle a few minutes before, was now roiling even more than when she’d woken up. “No. The line’s too long, we’ll just go somewhere else.”

“Aww, come on. You can wait with us—” 

Michael shook her head, already backing up. “I’m not feeling very well, honestly. Thanks, though.”

“Besides, we’ve got a thing in a bit. Gotta get moving,” Tilly jumped in. 

“Okay, see you later!” 

As soon as they’d passed out of earshot, Tilly shuddered. “I don’t think I ever feel worse about myself then when I talk to people like that. Not only is she four feet taller than me, but she’s gorgeous, built, and has great hair. Thank God she’s also terrifying, or I’d feel even worse.” A beat passed, as Tilly apparently thought through what she’d just said. “I mean, you used to make me feel like that, too. But you’re a lot nicer. And prettier, actually, just in a less scary ‘I could bench-press you without breaking a sweat’ kind of way that—”

“It’s okay, Tilly.”

“Okay. Just, you seemed kind of…”

“I’m not worried about that.” They were coming up on Café Disco, and Michael slowed. Ash was out today, probably nursing a hangover nearly as bad as her own, but the thought of being seen in her current mood by anyone else that she knew was a decidedly uncomfortable one.

“You’re worried because Ash didn’t tell you they’d actually dated.”

“Yeah.” Michael frowned. “I most definitely am.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael and Ash have an uncomfortable conversation, and Harry Mudd returns.

“So what you’re telling me,” Michael said, focusing on her heartbeat as she spoke, “is that you and Laurell _did_ date. When she said she was your girlfriend—”

“She wasn’t anymore.” Ash shifted awkwardly, his head wobbling from side to side as he worked through some sort of turmoil, apparently about how truthful he really wanted or needed to be this time. They’d gone out to lunch, at her request, to a pizza joint not far from Café Disco, but far enough that they could reasonably expect not to run into any coworkers while they talked. Greasy, empty plates sat between them. “But… she was, before. We used to go out.”

“Oh for—I thought you said she scared the snot out of you!”

“She does, sometimes! Especially now! But she didn’t always. She was really... nice, but also pushy and I didn't know how to turn her down, and, honestly, I was sick of eating half a frozen pizza every night for dinner and eating the other half for breakfast, okay?” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and glared the plastic surface of the table between them. “She’d take me out to really nice restaurants, buy a great bottle of wine, and these steaks, and she kept talking about how she'd take care of me and… I don’t know, it was easier than saying no.”

“So you dated her. And then you lied to me about it.”

“I never specifically—” 

“You _lied_ , Ash. You let me believe she was a crazy woman who was obsessed with you, when in reality she was your _ex-girlfriend._ ”

Ash picked up the jar of dried red hot peppers and turned it in his hands. “At the admitted risk of sounding like a total douchebag, I just want to point out that that doesn’t preclude her being either crazy _or_ obsessed with me.”

Michael bit down hard on her anger, and the feeling of betrayal that was even worse than the anger. “How long.”

“It wasn’t anything serious to start with, or at least I didn’t think it was—”

“How. Long.”

Ash winced. “Five months.”

“That’s not exactly just a fling!”

“I know!” He thumped the jar of peppers back onto the table and slumped back against the plastic upholstery of their booth. “I knew I had to break it off. I didn’t love her, and I guess she _did_ love me – before I knew it she was dropping hints about moving in together and getting married, even, but before I could work up the nerve to break things off… I guess I started acting weird, and Laurell got the idea I was cheating on her. We had a huge fight. _Then_ she really did scare the snot out of me.”

Michael pressed her lips together and thought. As mad as she was, there were questions that needed to be asked. “Did she hit you, or—”

“No.” Ash shook his head, but he still looked sick. “Scared me, though, yeah. She didn’t mean to, she was just… out-of-her-mind angry. Screaming at me, throwing things – not _at_ me, and the things were all hers. But still. She kicked me out. And… I figured that meant we were through.”

“Oh, God.” Michael rested her forehead against the table.

“What was I supposed to do, call her up the next day and say ‘Hey, I just wanted to make sure we’re really, absolutely broken up?’ I thought she was through with me! I figured… not the best break-up ever, for sure, but I never imagined she’d turn up again acting like she was still into me!” 

“Which explains the panic when she showed up here.” Michael sighed. “ _Were_ you cheating on her?” 

Ash’s jaw clenched. “No.”

He could have been lying again. Or maybe this was the truth. It was impossible to know, at least without asking Laurell. “Okay, fine. So it’s possible that when showed up here and told Saru she was your girlfriend—”

“No. That was weeks later, she can’t possibly have thought we were still going out. And you _just_ said that she asked you to tell me she’s forgiven me.”

“She said maybe she was wrong, and that she shouldn’t have gotten so mad the last time you talked. And maybe you were right it was time you two broke up.” Michael ran the conversation through her mind again. “And that she forgives you, yes.”

“Okay.” Ash ran his hands through his hair. “Okay. That’s weird, but… good.”

“Why, though?”

“Why what?”

“Why now?” Michael asked. “And why tell me?”

“Like she said, I wasn’t answering her calls. I avoided when she came into the café. All the reasons you already knew, except, like I told you that night at your apartment, she’s just kind of intense. She recognized you, so she went up to talk to you. It makes sense if you know her. She’s just like that.”

“I guess.” 

“Trust me, it’s not the weirdest thing Laurell’s ever done. By a long stretch.”

Michael started to ask what he meant by that, but shut her mouth. She didn’t want to know, and it was nearly time to go back to work, anyway. There was something she needed a more specific answer to, though, as she stood up. “Why did you lie to me? Why not just admit she was your ex?”

Ash shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably as he stood. “I’d just met you. I needed this job, and I needed your help to figure it all out, and I thought if I told you I’d dated this girl and it had gone badly, you’d blame me. It… wouldn’t have been totally wrong to, but I couldn’t risk it. Also…” He sighed. “I liked you. I didn’t want you to think I was… that kind of guy. And I really was scared.”

Michael frowned. “Scared she’d confront you and make a scene.”

Ash shrugged into his jacket. “In front of my new coworkers and my new boss and you? Yeah. Definitely.”

“Okay.” She considered that. It was a fair point. “Fine. And this is the truth this time?”

“It is, I promise.”

“I’m not happy about this,” Michael said as they stepped out into the early afternoon sunlight. 

“I didn’t expect you would be.”

“Next time, if there’s something you think I’m not going to be happy about? Just tell me.”

Ash nodded. “I will.”

She looked at him. “I’m serious about this, Ash. Whatever it is… next time, just tell me.” 

He met her eyes, impossibly solemn. “I promise, Michael.”

About a block into their walk to the café, their fingers brushed together in a way that even Michael, inexperienced as she was with romance, could tell only pretended to be accidental. She hesitated, then gave in and twined her fingers with Ash’s. He squeezed them gently, and they walked the rest of the way peacefully connected.

That sense of peace vanished almost instantly when they walked in the door of Café Disco, however.

"What's going on down the street?" Saru demanded as Michael stepped behind the counter. 

“Where?” Michael looked back over her shoulder, wondering if she had missed some kind of disturbance like a car accident somehow. 

“At the Neighborhood Nutrition Palace!” Saru glared at Ash, who shrank away from them and took up his usual station at the register. “Didn’t you notice?”

“Oh. I think the people from the gym discovered them. Something about amazing vegan protein smoothies. Tilly and I tried to stop by yesterday for brunch, but there was a line halfway around the block. We weren’t coming from that direction today.”

“Well, they’re not full today! They’re closed!” Saru, always a little high-strung, showed every sign now of nearing panic. The whites showed all around his eyes, and his tall, lanky frame practically vibrated with tension. 

“It’s probably just a family emergency or something. I’m sure they’ll be back tomorrow.”

“They had better be.” Saru leaned in close. “I gave my notice to Lorca yesterday! I have two more weeks, and then I can go over there. But if they’re going to start having _disruptions_ like this—”

“With the number of people we saw waiting for a table there yesterday, Saru, I can’t imagine they’d be closing. It’s probably just a temporary issue. Maybe a supply problem,” Michael suggested, when she saw that Saru wasn’t calming down as well as she would have liked. Supply of what, she couldn’t imagine. A regional tahini shortage? Breakdown in the transport of local farm-fresh organic kale and kohlrabi?

“It had better be,” Saru muttered, and drew himself up, smoothing his apron with his long, trembling hands. “I can’t afford to be between jobs again right now. Not so soon after the Shenzhou.” And with that, he retreated to his kitchen. 

“Is he going to be okay?” Tilly whispered.

“He’ll be fine. He’s just… like that.” Michael sighed. It was just like Saru to get upset over nothing. Although, now that she thought of it, it _wasn’t_ like him to quit a steady, if dull, job on a whim, for something relatively unknown. “He’s probably just panicking because he made the first slightly irresponsible career move of his life, and he’s afraid it’s going to bite him in the ass, now.” 

“You should tell your old boss. It sounds like she’d be proud of him.”

“She would,” Michael agreed, astonished by how much it hurt to hear Philippa referred to so casually by someone who’d never even met her. _I must talk about her more than I realize, for Tilly to have such a good sense of her personality._

A few anonymous customers came and went, and then Michael noticed a familiar face framed with long, straight brown hair coming through the door. As the last time she’d shown up, Katrina wore her badge on her belt. Michael stepped up to the register to tap Tilly out just as she reached the counter. “Iced Americano?” 

A tired but earnest smile broke Katrina’s gloom. “No sugar or room today, thanks.”

Michael marked the cup and handed it to Tilly back at the espresso machine. “Rough day?” 

“Not my best. Have you been to that place on the end of the block?” 

“The Nutrition Palace? Yeah, a few times. They’re closed today, I heard. Not sure what’s up.” 

“Yeah.” An odd expression passed over Katrina’s face, then she seemed to shake it off. “Well, thanks for remembering me. Nice to have a familiar face today.”

“Did you want anything else with your coffee?” Michael asked. “The banana bread is baked in-house, and fresh out of the oven a few minutes ago.”

“I keep hearing about your coffee cake…?”

A chill went down Michael’s spine. She did not love the idea of a cop hearing about the coffee cake. Hearing might lead to wondering about how it was made. “We’re out today, I’m afraid. We do have a new pumpkin bread, though, with pepitas. Nice and hearty, with a bit of protein and lots of vitamins to get you through the afternoon,” she added, since she had an idea Katrina might have stopped by the Nutrition Palace intending to get one of their apparently-famous protein shakes.

“That sounds perfect, thank you.”

Michael rang her up, all the while watching Katrina out of the corner of her eye as subtly as she could. _The precinct house is close, that’s all, and everybody needs coffee. She’s not here to keep tabs on you…_

The rest of the afternoon passed in relative peace despite Michael’s nerves, but around six o’clock she saw another familiar face come into the café, and this one even less welcome than Katrina’s. 

“Harry,” Michael acknowledged as she forced herself to smile. “You’re in late today.”

“Business doesn’t wait for the weary!”

“Another _ristretto_?”

“If that’s what it pleases you to call what you made, I suppose I can’t argue.”

_Except you will_ , Michael thought, avoiding Tilly’s eye to make sure neither of them cracked a smirk. “Anything to eat? We have some sandwiches on house-made foccaccia, or gluten-free bread if you prefer. Vegan, vegetarian, and meat options.”

“Hmm.” Harry twisted a lock of his beard around his finger. “Why don’t you tell me what the sandwiches are, and I’ll decide if I’m interested.”

Michael suppressed a sigh and launched into the list. Of course once she had read off the ingredients of each and every solitary sandwich in the case, Harry shook his head. 

“No… I don’t think any of those quite suit my tastes. A little pedestrian in the options. Now, if you had a grilled eggplant sandwich, with a nice balsalmic vinaigrette, perhaps—”

“I’m afraid not, today.”

“Pity. Well. I think I’ll just make do with a slice of your coffee cake.”

Michael tensed. “We’re out, I’m afraid.”

His eyes widened. “Can’t you make more?”

“It’s six in the evening. If I made more right now, it would have to go on the day-old plate in four hours.”

Harry stretched out his hands and smiled. “But you would have coffee cake for the next four hours’ worth of customers. That, my dear, is the cost of doing business.”

“Our baker has gone home for the day, I’m afraid.”

“And I suppose you don’t know how to turn on the oven?”

“I’m not a baker.”

“Of course not.” He heaved a long, dramatic sigh. “You’re just a barista. And you always will be if you don’t strain at the edges of your current skills just the tiniest bit.”

Tilly gasped, then turned the sound – rather unconvincingly – into a cough. Harry followed the sound, apparently about to launch into some comment, and Michael followed his gaze… and completely missed Ash stepping up from the back room where he’d been taking his evening break.

It was easy to forget, given how nice and self-effacing he generally was, exactly how tall Ash Tyler was, and how imposing he could make himself when he wanted to. He leaned over the register beside Michael, easily a head or more taller than Harry, and said in a very calm but flat way entirely unlike his usual manner, “Apologize to her.”

“Or what?” Harry laughed. “You’ll punch me? And get, let’s see, yourself arrested and brought up on assault charges as well as fired, and your place of employment sued? I think not.”

“Apologize. To her.”

Michael thought of Katrina and the entire precinct of other cops so itchingly close-by. With her record, they’d never believe she and the staff of Café Disco hadn’t started a fight if one happened. “It’s fine, Ash. Just let it go.”

“It’s not.” He didn’t so much as glance at Michael. “He was being unpardonably rude.”

“Oh, congratulations.” Harry smiled and gave a little golf clap. “That’s an awfully big word for someone like you!”

Ash’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Why, a weight-lifter _and_ a barista? A rare combination.” Harry – who apparently couldn’t resist pushing his luck every day of his life – clapped Ash on the arm. “So are you actually _not_ gay, or is this just overweening self-assurance at work? And maybe an extra dose of steroids at the gym before work?”

“Both of you stop.” Michael pulled Ash back – or at least tugged on him and gained ground once he allowed himself to be moved. “Ash, I appreciate the thought, but it’s not necessary. Harry, would you like some banana bread or something, or shall I just ring up your _ristretto_?” 

Harry watched Ash retreat, then returned his attention to Michael. “I want a coffee cake.”

“You’ll have to come back tomorrow for that.”

He considered this, then nodded slowly. “I will. And I’d like the recipe, as well, so that I can have it whenever I want.”

It was on the tip of Michael’s tongue to say that even the person who baked the damned coffee cake didn’t have that, but she restrained herself. “You can certainly ask our pastry chef if he would give you that when he’s here.”

“I will.” Harry’s eyes narrowed, then he seemed to relax. “Forget the _ristretto_. I’ll get it somewhere else.”

“You have a wonderful evening,” Michael said with quiet satisfaction as he strode out the door. 

A silence hung over the café for a moment after the door closed behind him, then Tilly let out a long sigh. 

“How?” she asked. “I don’t know how you do it. How do you stay so calm when he’s pushing you like that?”

“Practice.” Michael shrugged. “He’s not really that much worse than a lot of customers I’ve had before.”

“You… eugh!” Tilly gave a whole-body shudder. “I can’t imagine anything worse!” 

“That’s because you haven’t been in the service industry for long. Ash… I really do appreciate the sentiment, but if you _ever_ threaten a customer for me again—”

“I’m sorry. I just—”

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.” Michael rested her forehead against the counter. “Not at work. It’s not helpful.”

The next morning passed quietly, but around noon Harry showed up again. This time he didn’t even bother asking for his _ristretto_ – he went straight to demanding the recipe for the coffee cake. 

Tilly, two spots of bright pink covering most of her cheeks, tried to smile. “I’m sorry, I don’t think—”

“I’m not at all surprised by that. I wasn’t asking you. I’m telling you to go back and bring me your baker so that I can talk to him.”

Paul, who was standing by the espresso machine, very pointedly turned his back, as if Harry might somehow guess that he was the source of the desired baked good. 

“I’m right here.” Saru stepped up behind Tilly. “What is it that I can help you with, sir?”

“Ah, finally – someone in this establishment with an ounce of manners. I was here last night, and I requested a piece of your coffee cake. That woman—” he pointed to Michael, “told me you were out, and that she was not able to make more. I would like the recipe for the cake so that this does not happen again.”

Michael held her breath. 

“You want me to give you the recipe for one of our products… so that you don’t have the purchase it here again.” Saru frowned. “Forgive me, but that does not sound like a terribly wise business move, does it?” 

Even before he said it, Michael could have guessed what Harry’s response to that would be. She could have mouthed it along with him.

He straightened himself up to his full height – as if that made the slightest difference when he was standing in front of Saru, who was the tallest person Michael had ever personally met. “The customer is always right.”

“I… will have to speak to my manager about this.”

“Why? You’re the baker. Don’t you know your own recipes?”

“I am the _patissiere_ , sir,” Saru straightened and smoothed his apron down his front with one hand. “But the recipe is the property of the café, and I would be remiss in my duties if I shared it without my manager’s permission.”

Inwardly, Michael cheered. Tilly turned away from the register, faking a cough to hide her giggle of relief and delight. For once, Saru’s stick-in-the-mud personality – as well as his determination to hide the fact that he wasn’t the one baking the café’s most popular creation – was working in their favor. 

Harry waited with ill-humor while Saru went in the back and brought out Lorca. As they emerged from the back, it was clear that Lorca was not thrilled with having been brought out to deal with a customer. 

“This is exactly why I have an assistant manager, Mr. Saru – so that I don’t have to deal with every little thing.” He forced his expression into something approximating politeness as he turned to Harry. “I understand you have a request that my assistant manager decided needed my approval for some reason, so let’s hear it.”

“It’s a very small thing, and I’m sorry your employee troubled you with it,” Harry said with an unctuous smile. “I want the recipe for your coffee cake.”

Lorca blinked. “You want the what.”

“The recipe for your coffee cake. The one you make here. I wanted to buy it last night, and you were out, and this young woman would not make a new loaf, so now I want the recipe so that I don’t have to be disappointed in the future.” 

“You’re joking.” Lorca stared. When Harry refused to relent, his eyebrows climbed his high forehead. “You have _got_ to be joking, Mr…?” 

“Mudd. Harry Mudd.”

“Well, Mr. Mudd… you seem to be working under a basic misunderstanding of how businesses run. Let me bring you up to speed. We make things here, which we then sell to you, the customer. If we’re out of something that you want, I apologize for that. But right now a see a few very nice-looking slices of coffee cake in the bakery case. And even if I didn’t, I’d have to be a goddamned fool to sell you the recipe for something that you want to _buy_ from me.”

“Fine.” Harry took out his wallet. “I’ll buy the recipe from you.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like this place. Your employees are incompetent, and they can’t make my drinks the way I want them.”

“Possibly true.” Lorca crossed his arms over his chest. “But we do have a very fine coffee cake that you seem to like very much.”

“Twenty dollars.”

Lorca snorted. “Now I know you’re joking. I wouldn’t sell a whole loaf for less than thirty-two.”

“Sixty, then.” 

“Right – because the unlimited ability to make your own clearly accounts for _two_ loaves.”

“A hundred dollars.” After a moment of silence from Lorca, Harry rolled his eyes. “Two hundred dollars, and not a penny more.”

“I’d be happy to sell you what we’ve got in the case there for that. But the recipe stays where it is.”

Which Michael thought was rather a clever circumlocution, even if Lorca didn’t know it, given that precisely no one on staff actually knew the recipe for the much-desired cake. 

“I won’t offer any more!” Harry snarled. “More than two hundred dollars for a recipe I could probably find online would be nothing less than highway robbery!” 

“I wasn’t asking you to.” Lorca smiled. “You are welcome to search online, and try as many coffee cake recipes as you like, Mr. Mudd, and I wish you the very best of luck with it. I’ll even give you a little hint – Mr. Saru here has told me that it’s very important for all baked goods that our oven be positively even in temperature. Or at least that was the excuse he gave me for why we had to have the damned thing replaced with a new oven before we opened.”

Harry’s only response to this was a cry of inarticulate rage, which caused spittle to fly out of his mouth and settle in his beard.

“Would you like to buy a piece of coffee cake, then, or leave without? Or shall I call the police to have you removed, if you continue disturbing my customers and abusing my employees?”

“I’ll save you a call.” Katrina appeared from the cluster of customers that had gathered behind Harry, watching the argument unfold, and offered a friendly smile with no little steel behind it. “Mr… Mudd, was it?”

Harry looked her up and down, and pressed his lips together when he saw the badge on her hip. “Yes.”

“I highly recommend the Americano here, if you wanted a drink to go with your cake.”

Michael saw a chance and took it, and stepped up to the register next to Ash to wave a hand. “Next in line here, please. I’m so sorry for your wait.”

Harry stalked out, shaking his head and visibly cursing under his breath, and Katrina gestured two more patrons ahead of her and went back to the end of the line. Several minutes later she arrived at the front and favored Michael with smile. “Fun day, huh?” 

“Not one of our best,” Michael admitted. “Thanks for stepping in, there.” 

“It can be useful to have a cop around occasionally. This time, I am definitely going to have a coffee cake to go with my Americano, though. Unless you’re putting in something that could catch me up if the station puts us through one of their occasional random mandatory drug trials?” 

“I think you’ll be fine.” Michael laughed, but her stomach did a flip. Particularly when she saw Paul, out of the corner of her eye, _very_ casually looking at his watch, hanging up his apron, and retreating into the back for a break. _I had damned well better not find out otherwise._ “I can’t say the same for the lemon poppy seed loaf, though.”

“I’ll stay away from that.” Katrina handed over her debit card. “You were assistant manager at your last place, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“But not here?”

“Nope, just a normal barista.”

“Didn’t enjoy management, or…?”

“I liked it.” Michael offered a tight smile as she handed Katrina her card back. “But after the incident that resulted in the closure of the Shenzhou, I think I might not be working management for a while.”

“Ah. Right. Well, who needs that stress, anyway, right?” Katrina smiled back. “At least that’s what I tell myself when I get passed up for promotions. The money’s not worth the ulcers.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Michael replied, because that was the way to respond to a customer who saaid something like that. For herself, she’d always liked being the one who had the responsibility of running the shop, subject only to Philippa’s good judgment in matters. But the incident with Harry had reminded her that there were benefits to being just a common an underling, too. Sometimes it could be nice to cede the authority of dealing with the worst customers to someone else. She supposed that would be even more true in a career like law enforcement. Whatever Katrina was going through at work, it seemed like the kind of thing she only wished she could let someone else handle.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael has a very nice morning which is ruined later in the day, and sees a very familiar face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this most recent chapter has taken so long to get out! There's only two chapters left, but my life right now is such that I can't promise a timeline for them. I'll get them out as soon as I can, though!

Ash padded into the bedroom in his boxer-briefs, Ripper trotting at his heels. The cat had learned that Ash was a good source of petting, and could sometimes be cajoled into opening the drawer where his treats were hidden, and now seemed to like Ash almost as much as he liked Michael. Maybe more, since he could more often convince Ash to give him treats. "Are you sure you have to work today?" 

Michael finished tying the knot on her plain black robe, and smiled. "I'm pretty sure Lorca would fire me if I started to not show up for my shifts."

"Fire his best barista, for just one missed day? No way." Ash handed her a mug of coffee. "You could stay home. I could make scrambled eggs, and we could walk to the park later."

Michael sipped the coffee. "I'm pretty sure I'm out of eggs." 

"Well, that's a serious problem. You should call in right away so we can resolve it, and we should go to the store, and _then_ I could make you scrambled eggs." 

Ripper yowled and rubbed against Ash's ankle, then twined around to Michael's as Ash slipped his arms around her waist.

"No one's making you eggs, Ripper," Michael muttered between kisses on Ash's neck. "You already had your breakfast."

"Yeah, but _you_ haven't had anything. He's just helping me explain how important breakfast is."

"I'll have toast." Michael kissed him firmly. "And then I'll go to work. Because I don't need to be giving Lorca reasons to think about letting me go. I may very well be his best barista--"

"You absolutely are."

"--But I'm still just a barista, and baristas can be replaced."

"Not you." Ash nuzzled her cheek, and snuck a hand delicately under the hem of her robe to stroke her thigh. "You're not _just_ anything, Michael. You're... amazing."

"Not to Lorca, I'm not."

"Well, I have to admit I'm pretty glad about that..."

"You know what I mean. Which is why," she added, stepping carefully both out of his reach and over the perpetually-underfoot Ripper, "you made me coffee. Because you know I'm definitely going to work."

"That and because I wanted to prove I've at least got basic drip figured out pretty well." Ash grinned. "I know you still think I can't make a drink to save my soul, but you have to admit it's not bad, right?"

Michael tasted it again, and rolled the coffee thoughtfully on her tongue. "It's not bad. But Philippa bought me that machine as a graduation present. It's pretty much foolproof."

"Oh, _ouch_." Ash laughed. "All right, fine. Just for that, I'm not making you eggs."

"Are you any good at eggs?" 

"For your information, I am _great_ at eggs." Ash bent and picked up his jeans from the bedside table. "Just so long as you want them scrambled, not in an omelette. I, ah... still haven't figured out the flip thing, so when I try to make omelettes, they usually turn out to be scrambled eggs in the end. Or they turn out on the floor."

"Well, Ripper would be happy, at least."

Ash sat down on the edge of the bed and watched as Michael rifled through her closet. "Next time, then. I'll practice."

The question of which shirt to wear for yet another shift at the cafe suddenly seemed like the least important thing Michael could imagine thinking about. She didn't want to leave, and didn't want Ash to leave, either. She hung both the shirts she'd been considering back up in the closet and came back to the bed. He looked up at her as she combed her fingers through his hair. "It's a short shift today. I'll be off at four. You could come by, if you want... and we could go for that walk you suggested."

"Maybe go out to dinner, after?" Ash suggested.

"What, no eggs all of a sudden?" 

"They're really more of a breakfast thing. I'd be happy to try tomorrow morning, if you want..."

Michael laughed. "Okay, fine. We'll pick up eggs tonight, and tomorrow morning you can try making an omelette for me. And if it winds up scrambled eggs, that'll be fine, too. They taste the same, anyway."

"I'll take it." Ash pulled her close and kissed her.

After a moment, Michael pulled back and put a hand on his chest. "But I really do have to get ready, now, or I'm not going to have time to eat anything before work."

"Fine, fine." Ash stood and kissed her forehead. "I'll go make your toast. Butter and jam?"

"Just butter."

"Will do."

***

Even before she had finished hanging up her coat in the tiny employee closet, Michael knew that the day was going to be a difficult one. Saru was folding dough and butter into fine layers, over and over, but even that most practiced and beloved of acts didn't seem to be relieving his temper. 

"They're closed," he said before she could either ask or slip past the kitchen in hopes of him not noticing her. 

"Who is?"

"The Neighborhood Nutrition Palace. For health code violations, the sign says." He snorted. "As if that could possibly be true. I have a refined palate, and an extremely delicate stomach -- if there had been the slightest problem with their food, I would have noticed."

"They'll probably open up again inside of a month. Two, maybe, if the problems were serious."

"There weren't problems." He wrapped the folded dough in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge, then immediately started rolling out a new batch. "Not with them, anyway. They're simply too good -- too pure -- for this city."

Michael found that unlikely in the extreme, but recognized that saying as much to Saru wouldn't do much good. Particularly not in the mood he was in just then. In a few days he might be willing to listen to reason, but in a few days... "Did you tell Lorca?"

"Why should I? He never went there."

Braced for upset, Michael gently reminded him, "I meant because of you having given your notice here."

Saru smacked the butter into the dough a bit harder than was strictly necessary. "No, I have not."

"Do you think... maybe you should?"

"As much as you seem to think, for reasons I cannot grasp, that you are as much in charge here as you were at the ill-fated Shenzhou, Michael, you are not. You were, in fact, the cause of the Shenzhou's end. So if you want to offer advice..." Saru pressed his lips very tightly together, before clipping off the end of his thought: "Just don't."

"Fine. I'm sorry I showed a little concern."

"Michael!" Paul shouted as he ran in from the back entrance. "We have a problem!"

"Mr. Stamets, please do not shout in my kitchen!" Saru snapped. 

Paul skidded to a halt on the edge of the kitchen, his eyes wild. Too wild. Michael's stomach sank. 

"And please," Saru went on, "if you can, remember who is the assistant manager in this cafe, and who is not. If you have something important that needs to be addressed, you should be looking for me, not Michael. Now, what is it that is so important that you need to shout in the cafe?"

"The Nutrition Palace is closed," Paul said. 

"I am aware. And why is that of such concern to you?"

"You're not aware. Not even a little bit. But you could be."

Saru's expression darkened dangerously. "And what does that mean?"

"I haven't had my coffee yet. But it also means I need to make some coffee cake, because their coffee cake was almost as good as ours, but now it's not there, so people who want coffee cake are going to come and get ours."

"Tell me the recipe," Saru said. "I'll make it."

Michael sucked in a breath -- in Paul's current state there was every chance he might tell the truth and bring everything down on them. But Paul just laughed. Loudly, and entirely without shame. 

"Tell me! I'm the baker, here, and if someone is making the baked good that draws everyone here to the cafe, it should be me!" 

Still laughing, Paul waved a hand and tried to walk past Saru into the kitchen. "You couldn't handle it."

Michael flinched and closed her eyes. 

" _What did you just say to me?_ "

"I said you couldn't handle it. 'It' in this case being the coffee cake. You couldn't handle it." Michael opened her eyes again and stared, gaping, as Paul took an apron down from a hook, washed his hands, and began taking down baking supplies from the shelves. 

"Try me," Saru said in a dangerous voice.

Paul shook his head and waved his hand again. "You're the assistant manager. You're needed out front."

“I am not—” 

“Saru! I’ve got a customer out here who has a question about the quiches?”

Saru winced at the sound of Ash’s voice. “We’re not finished here,” he snapped at Paul, then stalked out of the room. 

“That was close,” Michael said as soon as he was far enough away. “What the hell were you thinking coming in here like that?”

“I thought you were back here and he wasn’t.” Paul shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, anway. He’s going to find out sooner or later. I can’t keep this up forever, Michael. I’ve got enough problems without getting stoned every other day just so I can keep up our supply of coffee cake. Now the damned hippies are gone, my last hope of getting a real recipe so that I can get the hell out of this mess is caput.”

“Can’t you just Google recipes until you figure it out or something? You’re a scientist – experiment!”

Paul rolled his eyes. “You try telling Hugh that I need to make a mess out of our kitchen every day because I have to figure out a mystery recipe that only I know.”

“Well—”

“No, seriously! Just try telling him that. Because I can’t. He’d break up with me.”

“Okay, okay. Just… try to be more careful next time, okay?” 

“Whatever.” Paul sighed. “I’d better get to this. I think I’m starting to sober up. Go on, get out of here. I’ll come out when I’m done.”

Fortunately there a brief but unexpected rush that morning thanks to an event at the convention center, so by the time things had settled down enough for Saru to return his attention to the kitchen, Paul had sobered up and gotten the coffee cake into the oven, and Saru was able to work out some of his frustrations on his chilled and laminated pastry dough. Michael decided to cut her losses and take her lunch break early. 

Since the Neighborhood Nutrition Palace was closed, she wound up walking several blocks to a place that sold salad bowls and the like. They offered a lot of variety, and were certainly healthier than most of the other cheap lunch options around, but as she passed their window she spotted a familiar figure seated at one of the tables: Ash Tyler. 

And he wasn’t alone. Across from him at the little two-person table was Laurell. 

Michael wanted to doubt her eyes, but she knew Ash as well as she knew almost anybody, by that point, and there was no mistaking the tall, broad-shouldered woman across from him for anyone else. Laurell wore workout clothes, as usual, and her dark hair was bound up in a loose bun atop her head. But the amount of eye makeup she was wearing said that she hadn’t just come from the gym and happened upon a familiar face. Or, if she had, then she _really_ liked to dress up after a workout. 

Her initial temptation was to storm in to the restaurant and demand an explanation. But Michael’s entire upbringing had been predicated on not making a scene, not causing trouble… and what was she supposed to say, anyway? ‘We were supposed to be dating. Just the other day you told me that she scared you, even though she wasn’t as bad as you initially said?’

As she watched, Ash reached out and touched the back of Laurell’s hand, which rested on the table. She turned it over and squeezed his fingers, and nodded solemnly about something. 

Michael kept walking, straight on past the restaurant and into the city. She needed to think.

***

She thought she had calmed herself down by taking the rest of her break to just walk. Back at the café, she fell into habitual patterns of polite small talk with customers and could almost convince herself that she was all right. But when Ash showed up at the end of her shift, all long limbs, big eyes, and impossibly soft black hair, all the rage that she’d stuffed deep down into herself came back. 

“What did you do today?” she demanded as soon as they’d stepped out of view of Café Disco’s front windows.

“Not much. Took a jog, worked out a bit, played some video games.” Ash frowned, his brows knitted together in exaggerated confusion. “Are you okay? You seem—”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Some people I know at the gym, I guess, why?”

“What did you have for lunch?”

“What?”

“Lunch. What did you have?”

“I… a salad? With chicken and… I’m very confused right now. I can’t help but feel like you’re accusing me of having lunch, which… is really weird.”

Michael pressed her lips tight together, and shook her head. “I saw you at the Happy Bowl today. With Laurell.”

“Oh, God.” His face fell. “Hold on, Michael. I know what it looked like, but—”

“Do you?” Michael walked a little faster, but Ash’s longer legs easily matched her stride for stride. “Because I would think if you knew that, you wouldn’t have shown up here.”

“We had plans, remember? We were going to get dinner and—”

“That was before I saw you getting lunch with your ex-girlfriend, Ash. Were you going to tell me?”

“It’s not what you think. I swear it isn’t.”

“Okay, then what was it.” Michael rounded on him, glaring up in fury. “And why weren’t you going to tell me about it.”

“She just needs a friend right now, that’s all. And I didn’t… after our conversation the other week… I didn’t want you to get worried.”

“Do you understand how hard that makes it for me to believe that I don’t have a _reason_ to be worried?” Michael crossed her arms over her chest. “So she needs a friend. She has friends. Why does she need _you?_ ”

“It’s… it’s complicated, Michael. I can’t…”

“Just tell me.”

“I can’t!” Ash held out his arms. “I can’t tell you. And I know how that sounds, but—”

“You know how it sounds, you know how it looks, but you can’t understand why I’m upset?” Michael looked away, staring at the cars going by in the street. “I trusted you, Ash. I trusted you when you said she was your stalker, and I trusted you again when you said she was just an ex. What am I supposed to believe now? Because I’m starting to get the distinct sense that the next step is me trusting you when you say you’re not still seeing her. And I don’t think I can believe that right now.”

“I’m not. Michael, please – Laurell and I are through. But she’s going through some stuff right now, and—”

“And for some reason her ex-boyfriend is a better choice to help her through that stuff than any of her other friends? For reasons you can’t tell me.” Michael shook her head. “No. No more. I’m through with this.”

Somehow, Ash had the audacity to look as if she’d hit him. “Michael, please—”

“ _No_ , Ash. If you can’t explain this to me – if you can’t tell me what’s going on and why you need to spend time with her and not tell me about it, then I can’t trust you anymore. And we’re done.”

She walked away before he could say anything else, though she swore she could _feel_ his eyes on her until she turned the corner. The drive home was longer and more bleak than she could remember it ever having been before, and once she’d locked her apartment door behind her, she picked up Ripper, buried her face in his fur, and cried.

***

Michael would have liked to call in sick the next day, but years of ingrained work ethic and the knowledge that doing so would make life miserable for her coworkers wouldn’t let her seriously consider it. She rolled out of bed with a dull, empty feeling inside, gave Ripper his breakfast, forced herself to eat some toast—pushing aside the memory of Ash making her toast just the previous morning—and drove to work with exactly two goals: to make it through the day, and not to cry. At least not where anyone could see her. Least of all Ash Tyler.

Fortunately, it turned out that he _had_ called in sick. The relief of not having to deal with him stuck awkwardly against her fury at his self-indulgence—he had the nerve to call in sick as if she’d broken _his_ heart?

“Are you okay?” Tilly asked as she rearranged the pastry case during a lull between customers.

“Not really,” Michael admitted. She gave Tilly the short version—extremely short, to minimize the risk of getting overheard when a customer came up—and was surprised when, in response, Tilly pulled her into a tight hug. 

“He’s pretty, but if he’s two-timing you he’s a total jackass,” Tilly said when she broke the embrace, squeezing Michael’s arms. “And you can do better.”

“I’m not sure that’s true, but thanks for the vote of confidence.” Michael took a ragged breath. “I think maybe I’d better just go back to being single. I’m good at that.”

“You’re not the one who screwed this up. He—” Tilly froze as Saru approached, and though she looked as if she wanted to look away, she screwed up her courage and met his gaze. 

“I’d better go and get the bussing bin back to the dishwasher,” Michael said with an inward wince. _If you have time to talk, you have time to clean_ had become one of Saru’s favorite assistant-manager-isms lately. A little personal chatter had never been a problem at the Shenzhou, so long as customers were attended to first, but Saru seemed to have taken his management style from books rather than the real-life experiences they’d both shared.

To her surprise, however, Saru stopped her with a delicate touch on her arm. “I overheard,” he said quietly. “And, for what it’s worth, he’s a fool. I know we’ve never exactly gotten along as… friends, but… he’s a fool.”

“I… Thank you.” 

He tried on a smile that didn’t seem to fit his face. “I would offer to fire him for you, but… we’re still understaffed, and I’m afraid after begging for my job back following the debacle with the Nutrition Palace…”

“It’s all right, Saru. I don’t expect anybody to fire Ash for me. We’re just going to have to learn to work together.”

“Unless he just keeps calling in sick until Lorca fires him anyway,” Tilly muttered. “That would work out just fine.” 

The bitter expression on her face, so utterly unlike her usual attitude, surprised a laugh out of Michael. “Seems unlikely, but I can’t say I wouldn’t be okay with it. Seriously, I’ll be all right. Thank you. Both of you. It really means…”

The bell on the door rang, and, out of habit, Michael stopped what she was saying to turn toward the door. The woman who had just entered stopped on the threshhold to look at her phone, her back turned to the café, but Michael’s usual greeting caught in her throat. Even before the woman turned around, she knew her. The way she stood, the way she moved, even the back of her head, the fall of her black hair, all were as familiar to Michael as any other human being could be. "Philippa? Philippa, is that you?" 

Philippa turned and looked her over, slowly. "Michael. I wasn't expecting to see you so soon."

"I... you're back. I didn't know..."

"I only got back into town on Tuesday. And I might not stay long." 

"Of course." Overwhelmed by awkwardness, Michael fell back on the kinds of niceties she might have asked a near-stranger. "How was California?" 

"Fine. I didn't love being stuck in my sister's house, but it was better than staying here by myself. I see you're back to being a barista at a new cafe. I hope you learned some lessons from the end of the Shenzhou."

"I did.” Michael’s heart hurt, but she pressed on. “Philippa, I'm so sorry for what happened--"

"Forget about it. What's done is done. If you learned your lesson and won’t make those kinds of mistakes again, that’s what matters.”

“Of course. I… I’d love to pay for your order, if you don’t mind, and maybe we can talk for a few minutes—"

For an instant, she thought Philippa would turn her down entirely – there was a distance and annoyance in the older woman’s eyes that Michael had never seen before. Then she softened, and smiled. “Of course. I’d like a hazelnut latte and an almond cookie.”

Michael frowned. "Our jasmine green tea isn't as good as what you used to get back at the Shenzhou, but it's not bad."

"I'd prefer the latte. Bad memories."

"Of course."

Michael returned to the counter and ordered two lattes and the cookies from Tilly, who was craning her neck the whole time, watching over Michael's shoulder. 

"Is that her?" she whispered. "Your old boss. The one you talk about so much."

"It's her."

"Wow. I mean, I've heard of the Shenzhou -- my mom was really into their tea for a while. I mean your tea. Her tea." 

"It's okay, Tilly."

"From the way my mom described her, I always thought she'd be taller." A beat passed, then Tilly visibly realized that Michael and Philippa were the same height. "I don't mean that you're short. Either of you! I just mean--"

"It's all right, Tilly," Michael repeated. "Just get me the almond cookies, please."

"You must be so glad to see her again," Tilly continued as she bent down to the pastry case. "Do you think she's going to open another cafe? Are you going to quit here and go with her? Can I come?"

"I don't think she's planning on doing anything like that." Michael glanced over her shoulder at Philippa, who had claimed a table by the window and was now doing something on her phone. "And I'm not sure she'd hire me again even if she did."

"Oh, no. She can't really still be upset."

"About me ruining her business and her finances, and indirectly getting her into a car accident that ruined her health? I couldn't blame her if she was." 

Ash came out from the back and met Michael's eyes. She looked away and pretended interest in her own phone. After another minute, Paul handed her their drinks, and she beat a hasty retreat back to the table. Philippa set aside her phone and tasted one of the cookies. "These are wonderful."

"They should be - they're the exact same recipe we used at the Shenzhou. Saru is the baker here, and the assistant manager."

"Good for him." Philippa look another bite, then picked up her latte. "I always knew he had it in him."

Which was a strange thing for Philippa to say, since she had admitted to Michael just a few days before the incident that she wondered if Saru would ever be ready to be a shift manager. 'He tries," she'd said, shaking her head fondly, "but every time I give him a little power, it goes to his head, and his judgement is... not the best. He's too cautious.' Still... "He has learned to take chances," Michael said. "Although I'm not sure he won't unlearn that, now."

"Why is that?"

"Well, there was a restaurant down the street... is everything all right?" Michael followed Philippa's stunned gaze, then looked back at her. "Philippa, what's wrong?"

"Nothing." She narrowed her eyes. "Who is that?"

Michael turned again. Lorca had come out of his office and was talking to Paul about something. "That's the owner. Gabriel Lorca."

"Gabriel." Philippa turned the name over in her mouth, and smiled. 

"Why?"

"Oh. No real reason. I like to be aware of the competition. I don't think I've seen him around town before. He must have just opened this café after I left, is that right?"

"Around that time, yes."

"Interesting. Tell me about the rest of the team."


End file.
